


A Shower of Kisses: Yoh x Anna One-Shot Collection

by Kefra



Category: Shaman King (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, High School, Humor, Innuendo, Kissing, Love, One Shot Collection, Romance, Slice of Life, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kefra/pseuds/Kefra
Summary: Get your daily dose of Yoh and Anna goodness with this collection of lighthearted, romantic, humorous, occasionally dramatic one-shots. All plots are different and original. The only thing they have in common is a kiss. Come check them out and let me know what you think. Appropriate for most teen audiences; contains innuendo, non-graphic sexual situations, adult language and "underage" teen-with-teen relationships. (Originally published by me on Fanfiction.net as "A Shower of Kisses" from 2007 to 2020. The versions published here have been revised and edited.)
Relationships: Asakura Yoh/Kyouyama Anna
Comments: 22
Kudos: 8





	1. A Love That Burns ... Literally

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in the summary, I originally published "A Shower of Kisses" on Fanfiction.net between 2007 and 2020. If you really like these stories and can't wait for me to revise them and post them here, you can find them at FF.net. I hope you enjoy these as much as I enjoyed writing them.
> 
> Obligatory begging for reviews: Engaging with my fans is the highlight of my day as an author. If it's not too much trouble, please leave a review. Even if you have something negative to say, I will take it to heart. I would love to hear from you all, and will do my best to reply to any feedback received.
> 
> Thank you for checking my stories out! Happy reading.

Summary: Yoh's wasting his time trying his hand at construction, Anna is displaced from her spot before the TV, and neither is exactly pleased with the other…or so it seems. Will they reconcile? Read on to find out.

_ Originally published 8/1/07. Edited 12/23/20. _

Rating:  **T** for some  **coarse language** and moderate  **romantic themes.**

A Love That Burns…Literally

_ Kiss #1 _

Yoh was breathing hard, and it had nothing to do with the brisk run Anna had made him take that morning, or the crunches she had mandated after lunch. Rather, he was excited over the work he was just about to complete. He hummed in time with the music blaring over his signature headphones, a sort of musical mumbling since he was holding several iron nails between his lips.

He plucked a nail out with his fingertips, rotated the wooden object upon the table in his room, and placed another plank of wood onto its side. He held the nail in place as steadily as he could, for he was palpitating with excitement over finally completing his project. He firmly grasped his hammer's handle, lined up his swing, and began to pound the nail inwards...

He didn't know what shocked him more-the fact that the hammer caught the cord of his headphones on the upswing, or a clearly annoyed voice from downstairs shrieking, "What the hell is that racket?! I'm trying to watch TV here!"

Yoh knelt to retrieve both his headphones, which were lying askew before his bed, and the hammer he had dropped in panic, and called out, "Sorry, Anna!"

Luckily he needed to leave the house to put the finishing touches on his masterpiece anyway, so it was with no annoyance that he swept up the wooden contraption and headed downstairs with his toolbox. As he passed by the living room, Anna spoke. "Yoh, have you seen the remote anywhere?  _ As The World Rotates  _ is on next and I can't stand that show," she explained, her eyes never wavering from the television.

"No, I haven't," Yoh answered, in exactly the opposite fashion, his eyes glued to the back of her head.

"Dammit," she spat, pushing herself off her elbow and side and getting up to change the channel.

Yoh made his way outside, smiling; he knew that the misplaced remote boded well for him, strangely enough. He laid the wooden contraption upon a workbench and hammered in the last few nails, then applied some sandpaper to smooth out the rough spots. He began to rummage through the toolbox for a woodburner, so he could write an inscription.

"Huh, I could have sworn there was one in here..." His fingertips closed upon a thin cylindrical grip. "Aha! Found-" He withdrew the tool, holding it up to his eyes to clearly see it was a screwdriver.

"Maybe not. Hell, what do I know about tools?" He briefly considered shelving the project until tomorrow, since his precious free time for the day was quickly running out, but he knew within his heart he wanted to finish it quickly. There was only one thing left to do, but at least it was one of Yoh's strengths: improvising wildly.

At the bottom of the toolbox was a first-aid kit; he ruffled through its contents until he found the book of matches meant to sterilize needles. He painfully remembered having to dig out a splinter with such a needle yesterday, and was thankful he only needed the matches now. He tore some empty bandage wrappers to shreds, and pushed them into a little pile along with the bits of wood he had sandpapered off.

_ Success!  _ Yoh thought excitedly, as the wrappers first blackened, then danced with vibrant, orange-yellow flames. He placed the head of the screwdriver into the fire until it glowed faintly, then began etching letters into the wood. Never a neat writer, Yoh was surprised how naturally the engraving came to him.

Excitement coursed through his veins now as he picked up a spray can of lacquer to apply the finishing touch. He held his breath and spritzed on the varnish until the natural woodgrain took on a glossy shine.

"All done!" he said to himself, rolling the can to his side and bending over slightly to pick up his completed work. "Oh crap, wait a min-"

Unfortunately, fires and aerosol cans don't wait, even for powerful shamans. A deafening  _ KRACK!  _ echoed off the exterior of the En Inn, followed by the low, rumbling sound of oncoming rushing air. The invisible pressurized vapors surged into a conflagration as they passed over the open fire, and little balls of flame flew out at every angle.

Yoh didn't see any of this, however; he had ducked under the workbench once he had realized his error. The flashfire was gone as fast as it had erupted, and the only visible remnants from where he was squatting were two bloated, charred halves of an aerosol can. The only thing he feared now was Anna’s wrath for disturbing her soap operas twice in the same hour, but a slap was much better than agonizing third-degree burns.

He crawled out from under the bench. At least he had finally completed-

"Oh, shit!"

Blind panic clouded Yoh's brain again as his eyes took in the sight. A flame was licking up the corner of his project, dancing upwards, and he acted upon instinct once more. With his bare hands he batted at the flame, smothering it out into the very wood it consumed. He surveyed the damage; the bottom right corner was blackened, but it could have been worse.

"Thank God," he sighed, as he made to pick it up off the bench at last-

"Yaaaargh!" Yoh bellowed when his singed fingertips touched the sides of his project. He had examined it, but his burned fingers had gone unnoticed in his premature relief. Now he saw the reddened, blistering blight glowing upon them, accompanied by a dull pain that surged to agony whenever they so much as brushed another object.

To top it all off, at that moment a figure emerged from the doorway behind him. She would have been breathtaking at any other time, but now she was stunning in a completely different way. Her normally attractive eyes were narrowed to dangerous slits, a deep line bisected her otherwise smooth brow, and her delicate hands were clenched in tight fists.

"Anna!" Yoh cried out, but whether it was out of fear or sudden pain from his fingers, he didn't know.

"You're lucky it happened during a commercial," she chided. Her eyes came to rest upon the burned-out circle around the two halves of aerosol can. "Oh, for the love of..."

Yoh gulped.

"You were playing with fire?! Of all the stupid injuries...You didn't burn yourself, did you?" Yoh made to hide his hands behind his back, but the abruptness of his motion combined with the sudden grimace that appeared on his face gave him away.

"Let me see that!" she demanded, grabbing his wrist; Yoh didn't try to dodge for fear of grazing something with his blistered fingers. She turned his hands over so they were palms-up, and gave a little gasp.

Yoh risked a glance at Anna then. Her angry demeanor had dissipated, and concern shone through her widened eyes. She loosened her grip on his wrists, and he felt her fingertips gently running up, toward the bottom joints of his fingers, half massaging, half caressing, and he was thankful she was still staring at his burns, or she would have noticed the redness and heat in his cheeks burning just as intensely as the fire that had injured him…

She looked up suddenly and froze. The frown and narrowed eyes returned, though they looked somewhat forced. Anna released his hands and pushed them away more roughly than she meant to, out of her own embarrassment, and turned away before Yoh could notice the gentle blush that was beginning to tinge her features. "You're hopeless," she said abruptly, with an anger that sounded as forced to Yoh's ears as they were from Anna's lips. "Come here and I'll get you some ice water to soak your burns in. Don't just stand there!" she implored, as Yoh stood stationary, trying to size up Anna's true feelings. "If you make me miss one second of  _ Nights of Our Lives _ I swear I'll make you hurt so bad you'll forget about these blisters!"

Anna grasped Yoh's wrists again in the kitchen, plunging his aching fingers into a bowl of frosty water. Despite the sudden chill, Yoh felt a warmth flushing his face again as she guided his hands into the bowl, and noticed she pointedly looked away from him, as though she were trying to hide a similar problem from him…

She sighed, still looking at everything in the kitchen but Yoh. "Guess this means I'm cooking tonight. Honestly, if you were going to burn yourself horribly, couldn't you at least have done it on the stove?" She exited the room, and Yoh continued sitting there, the warmth gradually leaving his face, until all he could feel was numbness encroaching on his fingertips. He felt like a Buddhist meditating, sitting cross-legged on an uncomfortable stool, his hands clasped in front of him, soothing his blisters.

Soon, however, he grew bored overhearing the melodrama of Anna's favorite show. Rising off the stool and stretching out, he went to the workbench outside to retrieve his work, at long last. When he reentered, the sounds of the TV had been replaced by the jarring sound of a knife hitting a cutting board; Anna had begun preparing dinner. Yoh seized his opportunity and crept before the TV, digging his fingers under the couch cushions. Sure enough, he found the wayward remote. Anna always seemed to toss it behind her after channel surfing, where it promptly buried itself along with several hundred yen in pocket change. He even found the program listings under there. He was so wrapped up in getting the goods back upstairs that his nervously twiddling thumb brushed against the remote's buttons-

The image on the TV sprang to life, mid-commercial. "…Bocky™ brand pretzel sticks! Now available in Horseradish flavor! Try them today!"

"Shit!" Yoh fumbled with the remote; the sudden silence lasted barely two seconds before a high-pitched cry from the kitchen interrupted. "If I have to make dinner, you don't get to watch TV!"

He made it upstairs and didn't bother shutting his door. Amidamaru was floating above his bed, but when Yoh entered, his ethereal pauldrons leapt a foot in the air, and his ghostly features brightened.

"Yoh-dono! I overheard about your injury. Are you all right?"

"Yeah, Amidamaru, my fingers are fine," he said, his voice trailing off as he slammed the things he was carrying onto the bed.

"I suspect, then, that your true injuries lie elsewhere, perhaps in the  _ ki _ or the  _ kokoro _ -the spirit, the heart. Might I be correct?"

Yoh bit his lip slightly and nodded. "I just don't understand Anna sometimes."

The samurai shifted his chainmail bracers before speaking. "Your fiancée is…more straightforward than most people. Perhaps, when she believes in and cares for somebody as deeply as she does for you, she can only find fault with them. Maybe it's because she truly wants to iron out your imperfections so that you can become an even better person; maybe she just doesn't want to waste time lavishing kind words upon somebody who already has all the reason in the world to feel good about himself."

Yoh looked stunned. "She… _ and  _ you…think that about me?" He was so shocked he didn't notice the creaking steps that signaled the approach of another person, a person whose delicate fingers smelled strongly of chopped onions and minced garlic…

"Certainly, Yoh-dono. I am honor bound to serve you and your fiancée is bound by arrangement to marry you. But neither of us would willingly leave you."

Yoh felt a warm tingle behind his eyelids and blinked. "Th-thank you, Amidamaru."

"Think nothing of it, Yoh-dono."

Blinking hard, he nodded. "I…I would be alone for awhile, please."

The spirit gave a deep bow, nodded, and melted through the wall. Yoh sat on the edge of his bed, mindlessly fidgeting with the wooden object he had made not an hour ago, wondering why his eyes were still watering-

"Alone for awhile…but not for long, I hope?"

The voice from just outside his door was familiar, yet vastly different, gentler, warmer. Yoh cleared his throat and hid the object under his sheets.

"Amidamaru is right, you know," she said softly, this time not bothering to hide the gentle blush that accompanied her words.

"Oh, Anna," he whispered, the words becoming harder to speak, "remember when we were kids? You always used to make me cry. But this time's different, it's better, I'm happy-" and he choked on the ending of his planned sentence, weeping silently into his shirt sleeve.

Anna walked over to Yoh and draped a slender arm around his shoulders. "No, it's the same. It's always been the same, Yoh. I've always felt this way about you…" She was about to take a seat next to him, but she sat down on something hard. "Eh, what's this, Yoh?"

Yoh shook off the sudden shock of feeling Anna's warm arm against the back of his neck, and the confession she had just made. "Huh? Oh…Well, um, I found the remote."

And with that he flipped up the sheets with a flourish, revealing his creation. The remote control sat next to the week's booklet of TV listings, housed in a wooden nook. At the top was a heart-shaped hole for hanging, and on its front was a burn mark. Anna looked from it to Yoh's blistered fingers and understood. "You did this…all this…for…?"

She saw more burn marks on the front, but these were controlled; they spelled words. Anna squinted her moist eyes and read Yoh's inscription:

"The channels may change but my love for you never will."

Anna could say nothing; her eyes watered and tears slid down onto her elated smile. She sat down next to Yoh, who turned towards her. Yoh's back felt warm and smooth to her hands, and Anna's felt comforting and silky to his; their faces drew ever nearer, until their lips brushed; Yoh pulled away slightly in shock but Anna advanced faster, and they kissed for the first time, slightly awkwardly but very sincerely.

He was just beginning to reconcile with the fact that the slap he had been expecting wouldn't come, when Anna broke away abruptly.

Yoh was too dazed from the sequence of events to form any words, but Anna saw his utterly confounded face. With a parting peck on his cheek, she headed towards the door, calling over her shoulder, "I left the vegetables on the stove. If I leave them any longer they're gonna be a soupy mess."

Yoh had nearly convinced himself for sure that he hadn't imagined it at all, that Anna really did say she loved him, that their lips really had just touched, when a shriek from downstairs derailed his train of thought. "Yaaaargh!"

By the time he ran into the kitchen, he knew exactly what to say and do. He poured a bowl of ice water for Anna, guided her fingers into the chill, and said, with a smirk, "Honestly, Anna, if you're going to burn yourself horribly, couldn't you at least have done it making a surprise for me?"

Anna merely smiled, looked deeply into Yoh's eyes and, with her free hand, tousled his black bangs gently. "Oh Yoh…you better believe I have a surprise for you," she whispered as she drew his face nearer to hers…


	2. Poolside Panic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go from bad to worse during Yoh and Anna's visit to the pool on a sweltering summer day. What happens when they're finally in the water together?
> 
> Originally published 8/2/07 on FanFiction.net. Revised 12/23/20.
> 
> Rating: T for strong suggestive themes and dialogue.

Poolside Panic

_ Kiss #2 _

Manta Oyamada slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, its bulging sides almost bigger than his entire body. Still dripping wet, and reeking of chlorine, he was eager to hit the showers and towel off. He was just about to set foot into the shower room, however, when he heard two voices speaking softly but with intensity:

"Come on, work it in there!" demanded the higher of the two voices.

"Alright," grunted the lower voice, "but now your back is all white and sticky and smells funny! Are you sure --"

"More! Squirt more on my back!" the other voice demanded.

"I think that's all I can give you," came the weary reply.

Embarrassment and curiosity battled each other in Manta's mind, but curiosity won. He peeked around the corner to see the well-defined bare back of a black-haired young man leaning slightly over the figure of a blond girl on her knees. The young man shifted slightly and began pumping something furiously between his legs-

Manta gave a slight gasp -- he recognized the two figures. He knew he probably should have turned around and left, but he blurted out, "Y - Yoh! Anna! I…"

Slightly startled, Yoh turned around, revealing the object that had been between his legs to be a thoroughly expended tube of sunscreen. Anna, meanwhile, looked up and gave Manta an ambivalent look of recognition.

"Manta! What brings you to the pool?" Yoh asked, tossing the empty tube aside and favoring his diminutive friend with a wave.

"The heat," answered Manta simply, returning Yoh's wave and giving Anna a polite nod. "You two here for some training or something?"

"What we do on our own time is our business," Anna began, smoothing out some uneven lumps of sunscreen on her arms, but her fiancé broke in, mortified.

"Anna, please! Manta, we came to the pool for the same reason as you. I'm just dripping with sweat, and Anna's really hot too." The words had barely left his lips before he realized the double-entendre he had just spoken. "Errr, that is, I mean, uh, we're both hot, dah I mean, that is to say, we needed a dip in the pool to cool off! Yeah."

Yoh grinned sheepishly, a distinct red tinge burning in his face; Manta gave a little chuckle. Anna took a single step backwards, crossed her arms, and parted her lips to utter one word.

"Smooth."

"Like sandpaper, really," babbled Yoh. He chanced a look at her, flaxen strands of hair tickling her bare shoulders, a nearly illegally tight bikini barely censoring her fleshy curves… _ Could you blame me for saying you're really hot? _ he thought, before he noticed her seething expression and turned to Manta. "Well uh, guess we'll be heading to the pool now. See ya later, Manta."

Yoh hadn't even gotten his toes wet before Anna rounded on him, grasping his slender yet surprisingly meaty shoulder in a slim-fingered death grip. He winced. "Owww --"

"What is the matter with you, embarrassing me like that in front of your  _ friend _ ?" the blonde demanded, releasing his shoulder only to wind up for a slap. She spat the word "friend" like a filthy slur.

The boy brushed his shoulder off, briefly inspecting the white finger lines where all the blood had been squeezed from his flesh.  _ So I accidentally let it slip that you're very pretty, Anna. What's the big deal? _ he wanted to reply, but instead lowered his head slightly. "You're right, it was pretty humiliating. I'm sorry." Without looking back to see Anna's response, he took several long strides towards the deep end of the pool, curled his toes upon the edge, tucked his head down slightly, extended his arms, and prepared to dive-

"You better be sorry!  _ Baka! _ " she bellowed, and with a mighty body slam, sent Yoh's precariously balancing figure sprawling off the deck into the deep end. He freaked out, somehow executed a somersault in the air with his random flailing, and smacked the glassine surface of the water full force with his stomach. His abs were toned and firm -- but the water was harder. His gut stung sharply, as though she, standing on the deck and glaring at him, had somehow reached out and slapped him in the torso with an immense, wet hand.

Yoh gasped sharply at the sudden rush of pain, but as he did he began to sink, and he coughed as the water he had inhaled assaulted his nostrils and windpipe. Somewhere through the panic and the sinking it occurred to him that breathing would be a good idea. He jabbed at his watery prison with kicks and clawed hands and felt himself buoying, until it felt as though someone had cracked an egg upon his head, and he gulped in air.

With his face red from asphyxiation, and his entire front even redder from his unexpected belly flop, he bobbed to the side of the pool, catching his breath. Anna gave him one last cold stare before she spread out her towel and perched herself on it.

Inwardly Yoh sighed. She was the one who wanted to go to the pool in the first place, and now she was just lying there, sunbathing on a towel.  _ If she wants to get darker skin, maybe she should just do a belly flop like me _ , he thought bitterly.

The stinging and choking aside, however, Yoh felt the heat of the early afternoon wash away from him as he floated in the water. It was easy to forget Anna's anger towards him then, with his back supported by a refreshing blue wall that gently ebbed and flowed, licking at his ankles and toes, lapping over his outstretched arms.

It had been a long time since he had last gone swimming, but for him it was like riding a bicycle. He glided through the water easily with every move he had picked up during his childhood. After several minutes of breaststrokes, backstrokes and dolphin kicks, Yoh's heart was racing, but he remained cool.

Anna was still lying upon her towel, but she kept glancing at the pool longingly, wondering if it was worth swallowing her pride in order to take a dip in its invigorating depths…

"Anna!" Yoh called, his body propped upon his arms, crossed onto the deck. "How can you stand that? It's sweltering!"

"I'm tough like that," she answered, the iciness in her response nearly making the temperature of the day bearable.

"Come on! You don't know what you're missing," Yoh wheedled, rippling the water near him with his index finger.

"I know what I'm missing," she hissed. "It's the peace and quiet I was enjoying up until a minute ago."

Yoh's shoulders sank, and he sighed quietly. "Please, Anna," he beseeched, and suddenly the water seemed colder and unwelcome against his skin. "I'm sorry for embarrassing you. Can't we still have a pleasant swim before we have to go?"

She said nothing, and continued staring with a noncommittal expression into his pleading eyes. A new heat began seeping up her spine and into her face, a heat that had nothing to do with the harsh sun but had everything to do with her equally sharp words to Yoh --

Abruptly she stood up, the guilt winning out over her pride, but there was no way she would give him any sign of the regret she was now beginning to feel. "Move over, dummy, I'm coming in," she said flatly.

Yoh grinned childishly, as though Anna's sudden change of heart meant they'd be going out for ice cream and cotton candy. Not really thinking clearly through his sudden glee, he playfully cupped his hands upon the water's surface and squeezed, sending an arch of crystal water up out of the pool and onto Anna's hair…

"Gotcha!" Yoh cried exuberantly. He felt unspeakably giddy all of a sudden, and didn't care much that Anna now looked livid once more.

"You son of a …You do that  _ one more time, _ and I swear I'll slap you like a pimp on crack!"

For some reason, Anna's comment caused his cup of giddiness to run over, and he began laughing uncontrollably. "Pimp on crack…you  _ crack _ me up!"

It was a horrible pun, but Anna hesitated for a moment, and the faintest traces of a smile seemed to snatch the corners of her mouth. Yoh remained oblivious, however, and cupped his hands together again, launching more volleys of water upwards with precisely aimed squeezes…

"That's it! You're going down!" she swore after taking the last of the jets full in her face. Sputtering and squinting, she charged towards Yoh, her legs propelling her heroically towards him, her face now displaying an odd mixture of vengeance and the playful exuberance that was still overwhelming her fiancé. He dodged nimbly, propelling himself from the poolside by kicking off the wall and gliding on his back.

It was Anna's turn to scramble wildly in the air now; she kicked her feet like a cartoon character running out of cliff, hoping to defy physics and tread upon the water's surface, and it almost worked. But when her foot touched the cool water, she flipped forward abruptly, clashing against the pool's surface with a thundering  _ smack! _

Anna gave a little shriek and a gagging noise, drowned out by Yoh's laughter. He still didn't quite know what had made him so deliriously happy, as he knew she would probably strangle him two seconds after she swam over to him. He was safe for now, though; he could see nothing of Anna above the surface aside from her hair, which bobbed and pulsed with the currents like a blond jellyfish.

It occurred to him that Anna was sure capable of holding her breath for a long stretch. He watched her drift slowly to the bottom of the pool, obscured and darkened by six feet of water, then seven, eight, nine…She sank slowly and with an utter lack of resistance or motion, almost as though she were dreaming, or unconscious…

Yoh snapped out of his jocund mood immediately. "Anna?  _ Anna?! _ " he called out, before realizing she could neither hear nor reply to his cries. He took a deep breath, feeling shivers of fear and adrenaline squirm up and down his back as he did so, and plunged into the depths of the pool.

Yoh kicked and stroked his way lower, towards the figure that crouched oddly upon the gritty bottom of the pool. She looked disturbingly like a puppet gone slack: She was hunched over at a nearly impossible angle, her arms drifting mindlessly with the currents, her eyes vacuous, her skin pale.

He propped her limp figure against his front, securing her waist and neck with his arm and shoulder, and kicked off the floor of the pool as hard as he could. Yoh wondered why she felt so very heavy, considering her slender, delicate figure, and he felt a hungering in his lungs and chest, a constricting pressure, and his vision began to contract. He kicked harder, the burning in his lungs creeping to his limbs, up the tunnel of blue, holding Anna tightly before him like a shield, and he thought he saw the tunnel lightening to a radiant yellow as he gave one last heroic kick and everything burned white …

Somehow he found himself crouched before Anna's form, still dizzy and lightheaded, but breathing.  _ Breathing. _ The word sent new torrents of panic through Yoh's brain, for as far as he could tell, Anna was  _ not  _ breathing. He clutched Anna's shoulders firmly, feeling the clamminess of her skin, and shook them vigorously. "Anna!"

She did not stir. Desperation pounded at the back of Yoh's head and he decided he would need to try his hand at performing artificial respiration. He drew closer to her pale face and inhaled sharply --

_ TWEEEEET! _ Yoh looked up, exhaling as sharply as he had just breathed in. "You two, cut it out! This is a public pool, not a love hotel sauna! Break it up or I'll break you up!" The whistle-blower ran closer, approaching Yoh, who read the bold Helvetica writing on his faded yellow shirt:  **LIFEGUARD** .

"It's-it's not what it looks like, I swear! She nearly drowned and I -- I thought maybe I should try CPR…"

The lifeguard sneered at Yoh, then squinted at Anna's unmoving figure. Suddenly he licked his lips, Anna's curvaceous, lifeless body reflecting off his beady pupils. "CPR, eh? Step aside, Junior, I'll tend to this young lass," he said lasciviously.

Yoh watched with commingled relief and apprehension as the lifeguard knelt before Anna's head. His aroused lips descended towards Anna's face, descending rapidly, until they nearly brushed-

"Yeow!" The lifeguard sprawled backwards, stumbling from the force of Anna's sudden slap.

Yoh gasped audibly and gave a little leap into the air. "Anna!"

She sat bolt upright. "'Junior' here is my  _ fiancé _ , Buster, so you'll get the hell out of here if you know what's good for you!" Anna yelled, but the lifeguard had already split.

He didn't know what possessed him to do it, but at that moment Yoh threw his arms wide and wrapped Anna in a tight hug. He braced himself to receive the same treatment the lifeguard had moments ago, but when her hand finally descended upon him, it was only to return his hug. Gradually Yoh felt the warmth return to Anna's skin, along with something else that seemed to radiate from her very pores, something as indescribable as it was certain to exist, something that quickened his pulse and enthralled him…

"Thanks," Anna whispered into Yoh's shoulder, "you know, for saving my life and all." And then he received a gift even rarer than her thanks, a gift as blinding white and pure as the afternoon sun but a hundred times as radiant: her smile.

"I … I had to do it anyway," Yoh replied, just as softly, and blushing just as delicately as Anna was. "I can't imagine living without you right beside me."

"Damn right, Asakura. If you let me die, my spirit will  _ never  _ let you hear the end of it." The words were less than kind but she was still grinning shamelessly at Yoh.

"Even in death, some things never change, huh?"

Rather than retaliate for this cheap shot, Anna merely drew slightly closer. "One thing would definitely change in death. I couldn't give you one of these," she said.

Anna's hand found the crook of Yoh's neck and pulled his lips to hers. He gave a start, but then relaxed, feeling a gentle tongue asking for permission to pass between his lips, permission which he didn't deny. Anna's fingers shook droplets of water from his matted black hair; Yoh rubbed away the last few droplets on her luxurious back. He felt as though he were about to drown again, but this time in an ocean of emotion, of passion, of love …

"Yoh?" Anna asked once their lips had finally parted.

"Yes?"

She pointed to his swim trunks; he didn't have to look down to understand what her next joke was about.

"Is that a tube of sunscreen in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a review - a few words is enough!


	3. An Unquenchable Thirst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh just knows he's not going to have a good day when a suspicious piece of mail causes Anna to fly off the handle…and all that before breakfast too! But he doesn't know the half of it…Will something, anything, happen to make the day any better?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/3/07. Revised 12/30/20.
> 
> Rating: T for moderate romantic themes and mild language.

An Unquenchable Thirst

_ Kiss #3 _

Yoh looked groggily at the image behind the spattered mirror and blinked hard. He absentmindedly tugged at a cowlick in his jet-black hair with one hand while halfheartedly brushing his teeth with the other. It was far too early to be awake, in his opinion, but training waits for no man …  _ or woman, _ he thought, wincing at the fury Anna would unleash upon him if he rolled out of bed one minute too late.  _ The morning has been altogether too pleasant _ , he thought uneasily.  _ Maybe she caught laryngitis -- _

"Yoh Asakura, WHAT is the meaning of this?!" screamed a furious voice, just as its source kicked the bathroom door open with an even more jarring noise. Yoh spat a mouthful of frothy toothpaste onto the mirror in shock, obscuring his stunned expression from his view.

_ I've only been awake five minutes. What did I do this time? _ Yoh wanted to reply, but instead wiped the toothpaste off the mirror with as much composure as he could gather. "Good morning," he said thickly, but without irony, favoring Anna's quivering red face with an innocent, toothpaste-filled grin. "What's the meaning of what?" he asked, and began sloshing some water around in his mouth.

"This!" she bellowed, thrusting an envelope as red as her livid face at Yoh as though it were a  _ tanto _ . He plucked it from between her fingers and squinted at it. There was no return address, and the deep crimson dye was beginning to bleed from the paper, running down his wet fingertips like blood. He hastily wiped his hands on a towel and he felt Anna's eyes boring into his back before he turned around and answered, as casually as he could manage, "I don't know, Anna. I've never received a red envelope before."

"It's a love letter, isn't it?" she demanded, making an affronted, disgusted face. "Go ahead and fool around with your red-envelope lover, but don't expect me to keep quiet --"

But Yoh had torn the envelope open and fished out its contents. He unfolded the letter. A rectangle of printed paper slid out, but Yoh caught it and stuffed it into his pocket, then turned his attention to the cramped yet familiar writing of the letter:

_ My dear grandson, _

_ I hope this letter finds the future Shaman King and Queen well! Your grandmother and I regret that we haven't written in awhile, but we rest assured your training proceeds smoothly. _

_ Yoh, you may not know this, but it is nearly five years ago to the day that we decided that Anna should wed you. I know she can be difficult sometimes, but you will need to accept your grandparents' intuition that she loves you, no matter how little she may show it. She has stood by your side through your trials and tribulations, worrying for your well-being and tending to you, and that speaks of a powerful love, no matter how begrudging she may seem when she does it. _

_ I would like you to use the enclosed money to procure a token of your affection for your fiancée to celebrate five years of betrothal. I know you may feel reluctant to spend so much on somebody who seems to treat you so badly, but her concern for you is pure, even if it is suffused with discourteousness. _

_ Remember always that we love you, but just as importantly, so does Anna. We wish you both happiness and success. _

_ Write back soon, _

_ Yohmei Asakura _

Though he had read it all as quickly as he possibly could, he had barely finished reading the last line before Anna's impatience smacked him full on the right cheek. "Oh, I get it! You'd rather read your steamy love letter than confess to me --"

Yoh rubbed his swelling cheek tenderly and folded the letter down so that only the closing was visible. "Anna…This letter is from my grandparents."

She squinted at the words intensely, as though she were willing them to change to something more incriminating. "What kind of letter from grandparents comes in a dark red envelope …" she asked incredulously. Shaking her head, she stormed out, muttering as she did, "It's just stupid … it must run in the family …"

Yoh, still stinging from both the intensity of her tirade and its concluding slap, gave a deep sigh and reread the letter, more carefully this time.

_'Use the enclosed money to procure a token of your affection…'_ _My grandpa sure has one hell of a thesaurus, that's for sure…The enclosed money? I don't see any --_ Yoh remembered the slip of paper he had crammed into his pocket when he feared Anna's wrath, and gave a little hiccupping gasp as he pulled it out and saw what it was.

"Dear God," he whispered in awe, turning the bill over in his hands as though expecting it to speak to him. "Ten thousand yen…this is more money than I've ever owned…" He folded it carefully and secured it deep in his pocket. His mind was racing as he prepared to leave, strapping weights onto his wrists and ankles. Closing the front door behind him, he proceeded to the street, breaking into an energetic jog, his sprightly footfalls giving his thoughts rhythm.  _ Ten thousand yen can buy a lot of stuff…But what gift would suit Anna? And what would be appropriate for a five-year anniversary of bethrowal -- betrathing … that word Grandpa used?  _ Unconsciously he reached into his pocket, the spelling of the word eating away at the back of his mind along with the matter of what to buy Anna, but his hand found only a carefully folded piece of currency.

_ It's gone! Oh no, I must have left it on the sink…I hope Anna misses it, or throws it away, or shreds it…A paper shredder! No wait, that's a horrible gift idea. Man, I've never done this before … I've never even had to buy gifts for anyone before, Manta's like my only friend and I don't even know when his birthday is …  _ A pang of guilt nipped at Yoh’s chest when he realized this, but he resolved to think about that later and pressed on, both with his feet against the sidewalk and with his mind as well.

_ What do people usually give for occasions like this? _ he wondered helplessly as his body kept rushing forward.  _ It's times like these I wish I'd paid more attention to Anna's soap operas … Maybe I should get her a couple of seasons of  _ Specific Hospital  _ or  _ All My Offspring  _ … but she's probably seen them all anyway … This gift giving thing sure is tiring, _ he mused as he dabbed at the sweat on his forehead with his shirt.  _ I should have a drink of water. _

Yoh's left hand groped around his hip, feeling for the bottle of water he usually carried on his belt. Wondering why he couldn't quite grasp it, he looked down. "You're kidding me … Dammit, I must've forgotten about it when I was in such a rush to leave this morning … along with breakfast …"

As if in response to his commentary, his stomach gave a loud, low rumble.  _ Ah well, I'm sure I'll come across a water fountain somewhere. Have a water fountain installed! Wait, that's a dumb idea, Anna wasn't kidding about me being stupid …  _ His running pace slowed gradually, almost imperceptibly, but his mind worked harder to compensate.  _ This shouldn't be hard, I mean we live together, and she's kinda cold sometimes, but she can be caring when she wants to be … _

Yoh smiled when he thought this, despite the fact that his mouth was now dry and he was no closer to deciding what to spend his money on. He also didn't notice that his energetic jog had slowed to a somewhat brisk walk.  _ Maybe I should surprise her and, like, bake a cake or something and hide the money in the middle. God damn, that's a horrible idea. What is this, a five-year anniversary or a five-year-old's birthday party? 'Happy anniversary, baby, now put on this blindfold and pin the tail on the  _ kitsune _!' Ugh. I bet Horohoro never has to worry about crap like this … _

He was deep in thought, oblivious to the warning signs his body was giving him. His body began slumping forwards, his forward progress now a slow waddle, and despite the merciless morning sun's heat, his sweating had stopped. Perhaps because of the heat, he thought of… _ An ice sculpture! Wait, come on, where the hell am I gonna get one of those? 'Aisle six, next to Jimmy Hoffa's body and the continent of Atlantis'?! Gah, why can't I think of anything good? Maybe I'm too thirsty, _ he finally realized.  _ I'll just … I'll stop at that mall for a few minutes for some water. Anna will understand … No, actually, she won't, but I don't want to die, _ he rationalized to himself.

_ The mall's just another block this way, _ Yoh encouraged himself, suddenly realizing how weak with thirst he had become. His knees buckled suddenly, and he braced himself against a wall before sidling on. The spotless glass sliding doors glided open noiselessly as he approached, and he would not have recognized the sunken eyes, limp arms, and stumbling feet of his own reflection, even if his vision hadn’t been so blurred.

Instead of refreshing him, the suddenly cool air of the mall disoriented him. His mind narrowed its activity further and seemed disembodied, as though his muddled, sporadic thoughts were beaming down from above into the awkwardly shuffling scarecrow below.  _ Need … something to drink _ , came a thought just then, and he licked his lips as though about to speak, but there was no moisture on his tongue. "McDougal's," he wheezed to himself, "just around the corner … but …"

Feeling consciousness weaving in and out of him, he made it around the corner and saw the sign he was looking for. He wobbled dangerously now, like a top about to skid out on its side, but made his way inside the establishment. He briefly looked over the offerings for sale, wondering what would be best, and pointed with an unsteady, pale finger. Sliding the ten-thousand-yen bill across the counter, he spoke, his voice an arid, hoarse whistle, "I'll take … one of those … small … no ice … hurry please … about to dehydrate …"

Yoh's head lurched forward. He heard the impact of his orange headphones slamming into the tiled floor. He bent over instinctively to retrieve them, and then blackness enveloped him as his consciousness slipped away …

* * *

Yoh's eyes felt sticky, but he could see a somewhat blurry ceiling, painted a soothing cerulean. His right arm was propped above the sheet that covered everything below his chest, and two needles were poked into his skin just below his bicep. He blinked hard, staring at the needles with a kind of skeptical horror as they slowly dripped a clear liquid into his bloodstream. Then, at the very edge of his field of vision, he saw a sudden swash of subdued yellow …

"Good," an unemotional voice spoke from that direction, "you're alive." Yoh looked over and saw Anna, her somewhat gaunt but otherwise impassive face peeking at him from above a smeary newspaper.

"Anna!" He wanted to scream, but in his recuperating state could only manage a loud whisper.

She put the newspaper down and stepped forward, walking around the intravenous drip stand, past the foot of his bed, to his left side, silently. "The paramedic said this is the most severe case of dehydration he's seen in years, so I guess I'll go easy on you for this one," she said, the ice in her voice beginning to melt. "Still, Yoh … I don't quite understand why you went for a run without at least a little water first. Not the sharpest  _ katana _ on the weapons rack, are you?"

Yoh gave a resigned smile, knowing that explaining the circumstances of his forgetfulness wouldn't help …

"Then again, I don't blame you for being a little scatterbrained yesterday --"

"Yesterday?" he broke in, unaware that Anna was just about to come the closest she ever came to an apology. "How long have I been here?"

"Almost a full twenty-four hours. I came as soon as the hospital called."

Yoh didn't quite know what to say to that, but she waved off his expression. "It wasn't as bad as it sounds." She pointed to the TV mounted to the ceiling, which was now angled to face Anna’s chair. "You didn't cause me to miss much. I'm a little sleepy, but I'll live. Anyway," she continued brusquely, "as I was saying, I'm not surprised you were a little stupider than usual yesterday, in light of this."

She pushed a folded sheet of paper onto Yoh's chest; he craned his neck slightly to read its cramped writing, spotted with water from having fallen on the wet bathroom floor.

"You, er," Yoh stammered, not sure why Anna was showing him his own letter from his grandparents, "so you read that, huh?"

"I didn't mean to," she shot back defensively, suddenly embarrassed. "You dropped it face-up, and I couldn't help seeing the … the important parts …"

"Anna," Yoh said gently, "you read it all, and I don't mind."

"I, well …" she floundered before she sighed lightly. "He … he doesn't miss much, does he, your grandpa? Sharp as a tack," Anna observed, and she knew that she wasn't referring only to his remembering their five-year anniversary, but also the parts about Anna's feelings for Yoh…

"Yeah. He's very perceptive. Kinda rough and short-tempered at times, but really caring and smart. He reminds me a little of yo -- somebody I know," said Yoh, correcting himself at the last moment.

But Anna, who was after all smart as Yoh had said, wasn't fooled for a second. She smiled despite herself and leaned in closer to him, combing his disheveled black hair with her slim fingers tenderly. "Your grandpa's all right. After all, if it weren't for him, you might've ended up in much worse shape after yesterday."

Yoh looked into Anna's eyes blankly. "Huh?"

"Well, you know. If he hadn't given you that money, you wouldn't have been able to buy a drink at the mall, and you might've …" She hesitated for a second, as though it were too devastating to even speak of, but finally finished, "might've died."

He understood, but at the same time became more confused than ever. "I … I didn't buy a drink, Anna."

"But the paramedic said your last words … sounded like you were trying to order something to drink … what was it, 'small,' 'no ice'?"

"Anna," Yoh replied, still in his weak, recovering voice, "Grandpa gave me that money to buy you a gift. And I wouldn't have spent a single yen of it on myself, no matter what …" He slid his left hand into his pocket nervously, uncertain if he really had managed to get what he had wanted, but he sighed in relief when his fingers withdrew a small velveteen box.

"… So, with my last few moments of consciousness," he finished, pulling the box out from under the sheet and placing it on his chest next to the letter, "I got you this. I hope the guy got it right."

He opened the box and delicately pulled out the glinting object inside. Anna appeared thunderstruck and stood there motionless, saying nothing, merely staring at the delicately filigreed golden band Yoh was slowly rotating with his fingertips.

"I told him, 'Small,'" he began to explain, reaching out and entwining the fingers of his left hand with hers, "because I remembered how delicate and slender your fingers were that one time you let me hold your hand …"

Yoh felt Anna's hand shiver slightly within his, and he saw her swallow hard, as though straining to hold something back…

"And 'no ice,' because ten thousand yen is a lot of money, but not enough to get any diamonds in this ring. At least none," he finished, "that are half as pretty as you."

Then, not caring that he was stretching the tubes of his IV dangerously, he reached out with his other hand to slide the ring onto Anna's quivering finger.

"H-happy fifth anniversary, Anna," Yoh stammered.

And she, feeling the waves of emotion finally cresting over her formidable barrier, broke down, tears silently gliding down her cheeks. Yoh did his best to comfort her from his confinement on the bed, but found to his surprise that he too was crying. They smiled, teary-eyed, stupidly happy, at each other for a few moments before Anna crouched before Yoh's chest, throwing her arms upon his shoulders. She nestled her face next to his neck, and Yoh felt hot tears leak onto his collarbone, mixed with his --

A loud throat clearing came from behind them. "Ahem! Asakura-san should not physically exert himself after such a severe bout of dehydration." Anna slowly took a single step back from Yoh's bed and glared at the doctor who had interrupted them.

"Nonetheless," he continued, looking at the clipboard in his hands, "it seems he has recovered well enough to have some fluids. Can I get you anything?"

Yoh nodded. "Yes, please. I'll have a glass of water. Small, no ice."

Anna looked at Yoh and, after a split second of silence, both erupted into raucous laughter. The doctor, looking completely baffled, backed out of the room slowly.

Once the laughter had died down, Yoh spoke again, his voice slightly stronger. "Anna, I know I screw up sometimes, and I'm sorry for that."

"You did okay this time, Yoh," she replied, turning her ring finger over in the light. "Look at it. Even when you're about to pass out, you picked out this one … It's beautiful."

Yoh blushed, looking at her normally austere face that was now at once vulnerable and tender, but mostly expressed something else, something that Yoh felt for her too … "Not as beautiful as you."

Anna leaned over again, brushed his chin with her fingertips, and planted a kiss on his lips, the lips that had not long ago hungered for water, but now hungered for the unique brand of love only she could provide him. An unquenchable thirst of a different kind now surged up his spinal cord as he found his tongue touching hers …

Anna leapt back as she heard footsteps enter the room. "Asakura-san? Here's your water, like you requested," the nurse said hesitantly, handing the water to Yoh delicately as though afraid he would lunge at her. "The doctor would like to run a few psychological tests on you before you're discharged, however…"


	4. The Best Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Anna thinks Yoh's slacking with his training when she discovers him in a disused storage room early one day. But why's he there anyway? And who knows what'll happen when she closes the door behind her?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/4/07. Revised 12/31/20.
> 
> Rating: T for innuendo, crude humor and coarse language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason, I decided to challenge myself and write a story that is entirely dialogue (and a couple of sound effects -- if you consider that cheating, that’s fair). It might have been for a contest or something, but I can’t remember. Let me know what you think.

The Best Gift

_Kiss #4_

"Where is that damn thing? I swear I left it right here. Argh, this storage room is so cluttered with junk --"

"YOH! There you are! Either that was the fastest special training run you've ever done in your life, or you're holding out on me. You wouldn't do _that_ , would you?"

"NOOO! Anna, don't let that door close --"

_Slam!_

"I'll open it again once you fess up, slacker. How many more miles do you owe me? Judging from the time, I'd say five? Let's make it six…no, eight, to be safe."

"Anna -- you kicked the doorstop -- and the door's closed now --"

"Brilliant, Holmes. Such clever deduction. But that's not what I want from you right now. No shirking on my watch."

"But the door … if it's closed and we're both in here and no one else is home --"

"You pervert!"

"Owww!"

"And you'll get another slap if you're not out the door jogging in the next five seconds. We understand each other?"

"N-no, Anna, you don't get it … The door … if it's closed and we're both in here, then …"

"Oh! Now that you mention it, it _is_ getting pretty stuffy in here. Maybe I should … ugh … erm, maybe it goes this way … Yoh, come here and jiggle this for me …"

"It's no use, Anna. That's what I was trying to tell you."

"You're kidding me … For the love of Buddha, I can't believe this. What kind of former inn has rooms that lock people _in_?"

"Probably the thousand-yen-a-month kind."

"Argh … if this is some kind of trick so you can avoid running those miles you owe me, you've got another think coming!"

"Search me. I left the door open halfway with a doorstop. Wasn't trying to hide from you or anything."

"Don't give me that tone. And what the hell were you looking for up here anyway? You must have wanted it really bad to have skipped your jogging for it."

"I, uh … This!"

"Yes, Yoh. I fully believe that. You came up here searching for a stained T-shirt … Ugh, it's just too hot to chew you out in here!"

“It is pretty warm. Maybe you should take off your to -- OWWW!"

"The only reason I didn't slap you harder, is because I figured maybe you're delirious with heatstroke. Now then, how do you plan on getting us out of here?"

" _Me?!_ I didn't kick the doorstop away!"

"And if you had just run like you were supposed to this morning, you wouldn't have had time to come up here in the first place! And I never would've needed to come up here searching for you. _Ipso facto_ , it's your fault."

" _Ipso facto_ … sounds like an exotic Greek island."

" _Yoh Asakura_ … sounds like an idiot. And a bad debater."

"Maybe I am. But I do know I woke up almost two hours before dawn to make time for this today."

"You expect me to buy that?"

"Anna, think about it. Breakfast was all ready and, I'm guessing, stone cold by the time you got to it, right? And I was long gone by then."

"W-well … okay, maybe you're telling the truth for once. But you know what that doesn't change?"

"What's that?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe, uh … the small detail that I'M STUCK IN A SWELTERING STORAGE ROOM WITH YOU!"

"Anna, wow. That’s harsh. You don't enjoy spending time with me?"

"You're kidding, right? _Please_ tell me that was sarcasm."

"But I enjoy spending time with _you_!"

"Yoh-dono!"

"Huh? Since when do you call me tha -- Amidamaru! Thank God …"

"I thought I heard a commotion. I don't believe I've ever seen this particular room …"

"Amidamaru, I need you to head downstairs. I left my backpack on the table. I think I left the keys in there. Could you bring it up to me, please?"

"… Dumbass."

"I … I am afraid Anna-sama is correct, though her phrasing may have been a touch less delicate than was absolutely necessary …Yoh-dono, you and your belongings exist on a different material plane from mine. Regretfully, I cannot bring you anything of yours."

"Oh … that's right. Well, thanks anyway, Amidamaru."

"I shall give my utmost to assist you, Yoh-dono. I will not tarry."

"Classic. Sometimes I just need a reminder of the genius I'm going to marry someday."

"Cut me a little slack, Anna, it seemed like a good idea at the time!"

"Filling blimps with hydrogen seemed like a good idea at the time. Speaking of time, looks like thanks to you, we've got plenty on our hands. I’d love to spend some of it getting back to my original question. What were you looking for up here?"

"Uh, j-just a couple of tools, that's all."

"Tools?! You mean like this hammer that's completely rusted through? Or maybe this hacksaw with a broken handle? Or this bucket that’s more hole than plastic?"

"I … well, all right, fine. Geez, there’s no keeping secrets from you, is there? Right, well, if you must know, I used to keep a … journal, and I’ve been hiding it in here."

"Mff … heheh … Bahahaha! Yoh! You have a _diary_?!"

"A journal! There's a big difference!"

"Yeah, I'll say. I bet the cover on your book of personal secrets and innermost thoughts has a manly picture on it, thus transforming it from a girl's diary to a guy's _journal_. Vastly different."

"See, this is why I decided to hide it."

"Oh, this is just gold. Now I've got to find it before you do."

"Nooo! Ugh …"

"Hmm … I haven't seen you this agitated in a while. You must be keeping some juicy secrets in there."

"No, no, nothing like that. Just a boring journal. Ouch! Damn, who leaves thumbtacks loose like this?!"

"Relax. I might not find it. There are a lot of books in here … _Let's Cook with Okra!, A Compendium of Tentacled Japanese Classics, Lady Murasaki's Lover …_ Heh, those last two must be yours, Yoh…"

"Oh, give me a break. Wait, all the books are in your part of the pile? Dammit."

"… _50 Ways to Suicide with Honor …_ Aha, what's this?"

"Crap! Dah, I mean, that's just a, um, sticker album, you should probably throw it away."

"Oooooh! Now let's see … _'I felt kinda bad for lying and saying I didn’t know the short kid I met in the graveyard yesterday, Manta, in class today. But it's weird for me, being an outcast, I've never really had friends before…'_ "

"Argh! Give it! Give it back!"

"Sheesh, relax. This is really compelling reading, even if your spelling is atrocious. The _sensitive_ side of Yoh! Your _untold story_ ! This is better than any soap opera I've ever seen! … Ahem, ' _Today Ice Queen Anna added 5 miles to my run because I left the edge of the sink wet. I made a bet with Amidamaru that she was dropped as a baby, that's why she's so mean now. He thinks she was deprived of attention as a child. I wonder when I'll find out. I really want to know. It might explain why she whips me so bad …'_ "

"YEOW!"

"For your information, it's because you're such a screw-up!"

"I … You're right, I'm sorry, Anna …"

"You better hope for your sake that you wrote _something_ good about me in here! Hmm… ' _Feeling pretty low today. Horohoro and I were talking about sex ed class and puberty and all that. He told me his size. I didn’t know mine, so I stole a ruler from school. I’m bummed. I hope he’s lying, because it turns out I’m only -- '_ Ewwwww! Yoh! That's sick! I don't wanna know about that!"

"Er … well, you said it yourself, my 'personal secrets' are all in there. Besides, I warned you to give it back! And if you thought that part was bad, you should probably stop before you get any further."

"That was pretty gross, but maybe there are more juicy parts to make up for that in here … Ah! _'I was lying in bed last night unable to sleep. My mind wandered, and I thought of Anna, and I couldn't get her out of my mind. I really wish she would show more kindness to me. When she isn’t going off at me, I actually find myself very attracted to her. Something weird was happening. The more I thought of her, the more I knew what I wanted to do. I felt very guilty. But I couldn’t help myself. As I thought of her, I reached under the blankets and, for the first time --'_ OH MY GOD! That is possibly the most disturbing thing I've ever read! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

"Yowch! I guess I deserved that one … I'm sorry, Anna! I couldn't help it, you know, I am at that age when … I go through … changes … and I never thought you would ever read that … not that it makes it better, but …"

"After all that sick crap, this damn journal owes me some good stuff. This looks promising … ' _Anna gave me the day off from training today, for my 15th birthday. It's kind of hard to believe I've been living with the Ice Mistress' --_ Ooh, I'm a _mistress_ now, nice to see a little originality on your part -- ' _for two years now, although it felt like about 50. Anyway, Manta gave me a sweet Monte Blanco pen, it looks really cool, but I'm not used to writing with it, hope I can read this later! Anna's gift to me was a promise not to slap me all day, which doesn't sound so great unless you realize how often and hard she slaps. But the best gift' --_ The best gift wasn't my promise not to slap you all day? Why don't I just pay you back for the ones I missed back then?"

"Anna, just keep reading that part … I think it'll explain something."

"Have it your way … _'But the best gift arrived from my grandpa in the mail. It was a short note, attached to a framed portrait of Anna. The note said, 'If you can do well enough to make her smile, that is a gift in itself.' I looked at the picture more closely, I turned it over and removed it from the frame. I was convinced that this was another one of my grandpa's lessons, that there was money or something hidden in there' --_ Yoh, this isn't exactly helping your case -- _'but then I realized the photo was better than money, or anything else, for that matter. Anna was stunning in the picture, her golden hair like a halo around her breathtaking face, with inviting, wide eyes and a smile. Her smile is rare, but absolutely beautiful, and captured forever within the frame.'_ Oh, Yoh … that's actually kind of sweet, you know …"

"It was a stupid thing to write. It's all stupid. Maybe you should stop --"

"No, this is a good opportunity for me to see what you really think about me. It's kind of a rush … _'I stared at the little square of color for a long time, wondering why I had never seen Anna look at me the same way she had at the camera the instant the photo was taken. I hate the Ice Queen, and the person in the picture was her, but at the same time was someone completely different -- somebody I knew I loved, or at least could love, could see myself marrying someday. And I thought for a long time, what can I possibly do to bring out that smile from her pouting lips, melt the ice in her glorious eyes? I don't know, but I hope someday I figure it out, and she will smile at me, maybe even kiss me …'_ "

"Anna, please, I … I must have written all that at three in the morning or something, I was delirious, don't take it seriously --"

"No, Yoh. This … I don't know why you kept those thoughts secret. It's a relief that I'm not wasting my love on someone who hated me."

"Your … love?"

"Of course, stupid. I mean, I might not get all drippy like they do in the soap operas, but, c'mon, do you really think I'd let someone annoy me so much if I didn't love them?"

"I …"

"Yoh, I've been right behind you when you were on the brink of death. And just because it _looks_ like I'm always unaffected doesn't mean that I don't cry into my pillow with worry when no one's around to watch. I'm not comfortable wearing my emotions on my sleeve. That’s just the way I am. But I didn't know that you thought of my smile so highly …"

"Th-there it is … and Anna, it's just like I wrote in my journal … so perfect, so beautiful … What did I do to earn it?"

"Well, unlike this damn door, you finally opened up to me."

"I … I love that smile … and I love … what are you -- mmmmm …"

"… mmmm …"

_Creak._

"Ahhhhh!"

"… mmm … oh, Anna -- _MANTA?!_ "

"I … uhm, Amidamaru led me here, I found the key, but it looks like the two of you are, erm, busy at the moment, so maybe I should come back tomorrow …"

_Slam!_

"No! Manta, come … mmmm … never mind …"

"… mmm …"


	5. Under My Umbrella

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh's inattentiveness results in the ruination of one of Anna's most treasured possessions. On the rainiest, most insipid morning he's seen in years, will inspiration finally strike him and help him to atone for his error?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/6/07. Revised 1/4/21.
> 
> Rating: T for romantic themes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this was inspired by "Umbrella" -- the sort of fic I could only have written 14 years ago. I hope you enjoy it anyway!

" _ Took an oath, I'm a-stick it out to the end. Now that it's raining more than ever, know that we'll still have each other. You can stand…" _

Under My Umbrella

_ Kiss #5 _

The sizzle of frying cooking oil, along with the dull background noise of pouring rain, echoed through the kitchen where Yoh stood before the stove, paying only vague attention to the eggs he was noncommittally poking with a spatula. He made breakfast every morning, a mundane routine that gave him plenty of time to think, even if he was usually so drowsy that most of his thoughts involved the comfort and warmth of his bed, and the sleep he could be having…

A drop of hot cooking oil landed on his arm with a sizzle, clearing his mind of any fantasies of returning to bed. "Yowch!"

A brisk voice from behind him spoke. "If you think that hurt, just wait till I get my hands on you --"

"Ah, good morning, Anna." Yoh turned to face her. His sleepy eyes took her angry eyes in. He further noted her tightly clenched hands and aggressive, forward-leaning stance.

"It most certainly is not a good morning!” Her voice was sizzling with anger, not unlike the bacon he had just fried up.

Yoh gulped. “Did I screw something up?”

"Oh,” Anna said incredulously, “‘screwup’ doesn’t even begin to describe what you did yesterday…" she menaced as she stalked out of the room.

"I wonder what I did this time," he muttered, cracking eggs open against the side of his frying pan. "She seems grumpier than usual, and that's really saying something…"

Behind him, Anna slammed a half-full laundry basket onto the kitchen table. He gave a start and nearly dropped his spatula, but took a quick breath and turned around.

"Yoh," Anna said through clenched teeth in a nearly hysterical tone of forced pleasantness, "I don't recall ever buying pink socks. Or pink skirts. Or pink tops. Or, for that matter, pink panties." Despite the maelstrom he knew she was leading him into, Yoh felt  _ himself _ pink slightly at Anna's mention of her undergarments. "So perhaps you can explain to me why every formerly white article of clothing in this load of laundry now looks like something you'd find in a department store bargain bin the week after Valentine's Day?"

_ Uh-oh, _ he thought as comprehension began to dawn upon him. There had been something red on top of the laundry yesterday, but he had forgotten about Anna's special instructions…

"I take your silence to mean," Anna continued, plowing through Yoh’s feeble attempts to start formulating a response, "that maybe a red article of clothing somehow made it into this load of laundry. Call me crazy, but I think I might have given you something red to wash yesterday…" She made an exaggerated gesture around her forehead. "Along with some special instructions. Remember? Something along the lines of, 'Yoh, my headscarf needs to be hand-washed in cold water with a mild soap.' Ring any bells?"

"Um…" The words were indeed ringing bells in his head -- alarm bells, almost exactly one day too late. Yoh, spacey as always, had forgotten.

"Look at it!" she burst out, tugging out her headscarf from beneath a few pairs of now very pink socks. "You ruined it! No one will take me seriously if I wear this. Look!" She tied it behind her head hastily, the folds of cloth sweeping down her back violently, a cascading embodiment of Anna's anger.

Yoh looked Anna over, her trademark vibrant red bandana-like fashion accessory now faded to a delicate pink. It definitely brought out the smoothness of her skin and the tenderness she so rarely displayed. "Actually, Anna," he said truthfully, "I think it suits you. It's cute!"

"Well, forget it,” she spat dismissively. “I don't do pink. And I certainly don't do cute." She doffed the headscarf, balled it up, and flung it in Yoh's direction.

He caught it, but didn't quite know what to say, so he tried his best: "I … I'm really sorry, Anna. Maybe I can cut back a little on food or something, and buy you a replacement?"

Anna’s hands moved to the strands of beads around her neck. "A replacement? When your grandmother gave me these beads years ago," she explained, her voice now oozing with a restrained, icy fury that sent chills up Yoh's spine, "they were wrapped in a silky red cloth. Three guesses for what happened to that cloth, thanks to you."

Yoh stared at Anna's back wordlessly as she stormed out of the room silently, leaving waves of anguish behind her.

"Anna, wait! I … I'm sorry, I …" But Yoh knew it was no use. Yoh put the pink cloth on the kitchen table. It seemed to stare back at him, chiding him for his thoughtlessness. He picked it back up and folded it until it fit into his pocket. He felt an indescribable sense of unease, guilt and frustration as he hurriedly finished cooking, feeling not the least bit hungry, and left the kitchen dazed and afraid, sheets of rain still pounding the roof.

Yoh thought dimly that it might be a good idea to take his umbrella with him for his morning run, and searched his room halfheartedly for it. He saw its majestic oak handle poking out from under his nightstand. He bent over to retrieve it, kicking up dust as he did so.

Suddenly feeling as though the house was stifling him, Yoh made his way outside and popped his umbrella open. Its canopy was truly gargantuan in size, easily large enough to shelter two, but in the drafty rain he needed to angle it carefully to keep himself dry.

Gloom surrounded him as he jogged from the countryside into town. Walls of grey poured from the heavens, making usually sunny fields and clear streams drab and murky. The sun could not penetrate the thick, ominous clouds that choked the sky; all was bleak, and this seemed to complement Yoh's current mood uncannily.

Not often did Yoh waver from his usual insouciant attitude, but he could not shake off his own despondence. He felt as though the rain were a million tiny hammers trying to pound guilt into his very soul. He had but one item with which to ward them off, yet ironically, looking at it made him feel even worse. The color of its canopy was a dead ringer for Anna’s headscarf, or at least it had been before his careless washing. And as it had been Anna's gift from Yoh's grandmother, so had the umbrella once been his grandfather's…

His feet had become numb and wrinkled from the cold rain, and although his heart raced with the exertion of running, he felt chilled to the bones. The only warmth he felt came from his pocket, where he had stashed Anna's now pink headscarf, but it was an ignominious warmth, a humiliated blush, a scarlet letter that had faded and taken up residence just below his hip.

He realized gradually that, though he had unconsciously been picking up speed as though trying to run away from something, there was no escaping that he had to do something to make things right. Once he decided to take action, he felt a kind of healthy fever surge through his frozen body, and he knew the usual, happy-go-lucky Yoh was reemerging …

_ I hope this works, _ he thought as he slowed his pace, squinting through the rain to orient himself.  _ There's the Larson convenience store, I think … so that should be the copy shop next to it, and then … Yes, there it is! The tailor! _

"I'm not even sure what I'm going to do yet, but I'm sure it'll all work out somehow," he whispered to himself with a sly grin. He folded the crimson umbrella closed and shook it as dry as he could before walking into the tailor's shop…

Sopping wet, cold, and sputtering, like a sailor in the flotsam of a shipwreck, Yoh called out through the downpour, "Anna, I'm home!" He carried the umbrella in his left hand and a white parcel in his right, but concealed both behind his back. He received no acknowledgment, and called again, "Anna, could you please bring me a towel? I don't want to drip all over the floor."

At that, he heard movement from inside. A moment later, the front door slid open and a white towel attacked his face. Yoh did his best to sop up the water from his dripping hair and legs with one hand while holding his belongings in the other. Anna merely glared at him as he did so, but he knew things could have been worse: At least she wasn't denying his existence.

Yoh spread the damp towel on the floor just inside the Inn, with Anna continuing to glare at him, and he felt apprehensive, his soaked shirt clinging to his chest and back like a coiled snake, constricting him. He took a step forward onto the towel and out of the rain. He felt streams of water, warmed slightly by his body heat, slough off of him onto the towel, like a knot of earthworms. Finally Anna spoke, in a tone that was neither angry nor resentful, but at the same time overwhelmingly glacial. "Yoh, you're the only person in the world who could manage to get so drenched while holding an umbrella the size of a circus tent."

"Anna, I know I messed up," he said, for now that Anna had broken the silence, words had rushed into his mind and began spilling out past his lips. "I know nothing can replace the keepsake I ruined, and what it means to you …"

Her face remained stoic but her arms uncrossed from her chest.

"… So I hope you can accept this as a gesture of my sincere apology," he finished, extending his arm and presenting Anna with the white parcel.

She accepted it, perhaps a little more roughly than was necessary, and nodded curtly. "You're right, Yoh. My headscarf was very precious to me, but I guess I'll need a replacement. Thanks. Now, you’d better take a shower. You run tomorrow whether you're sick or not." She was about to turn away when she suddenly realized, "Wait a second. I didn't give you any money…How did you get this?"

"Aha, well, I went to the tailor in town," he began. "I showed him this," and Yoh pulled out the carefully folded pink cloth from his pocket, "and said I wanted another one made, just like it, but in red."

Anna took up the parcel in earnest now, digging her fingernails into the wrapping, wanting to see the replacement headscarf. "And he did it for free?"

"I told him that it was for my fiancee, and he said he couldn’t turn away a young man in love, so he started showing me all these cloth samples to see what color I wanted. But then I thought, I need to make something with real sentimental value, to replace something that clearly means so much to you. So I decided to use --"

"This feels familiar … smooth, resilient, thin … In fact, it almost feels like the cloth from your … But you didn't, you couldn't have, your grandfather gave it to you … but then it would explain why you're soaked …"

And to finish his tale, Yoh produced his umbrella now, sweeping it from behind his back. It rustled like an old creaky windmill as its bare metal joints and rods collided with each other. It vaguely resembled a robotic hand; even collapsed, and without its canopy, it commanded respect. Anna gaped at it for a few seconds, comprehension registering in her absolutely shocked expression, and then --

The skeletal umbrella clattered to the floor with a metallic swish as Anna charged him with passion, wrapping his dripping body in her arms. Yoh felt the chilliness in his body evaporate from the affection that radiated from his fiancée, a warmth that could only mean that her normally icy demeanor had melted away. Yoh plucked the new bandana from its perch around Anna's arm, tied it snugly about her forehead, and smoothed out its wrinkles.

"So, what do you think?" she asked, shifting the knot slightly and favoring Yoh with a pose.

"Beautiful," he said, smiling sheepishly as he felt a new, slightly embarrassed heat invade his cheeks, "and the new headscarf isn't bad either."

"Oh, Yoh…" The long, vibrant ruff of Anna's new headscarf flashed fiercely as her hands drew Yoh's head nearer to meet hers halfway. Her lips found his and grazed them, pressed upon them, gently but passionately, the same way her hands were warming up the back of his soaked shirt. He was taken by surprise, but recovered quickly, leaning into her slightly, feeling the skirt of her new headgear rub against the tops of his hands. Her tongue found his, thanked him for all he had done without speaking a word, and Yoh, ever the gentleman, did not deny the accolade …

Slowly their lips parted, and Yoh peered down at Anna, his gaze gentle yet exuberant. Anna, however, was looking back and forth between the incomplete umbrella and pink headscarf, and he knew what she was thinking…

"Oh, no …"

"What?" she asked defensively, though she sounded playful rather than offended. "It'd be cute!"

"Sorry," he replied with a knowing smile, "I don't do pink. And I certainly don't do cute."

"Not for you, silly! I'll make it … and then, maybe, when it's raining more than ever, you can … you know … you can stand under my umbrella."

Yoh smiled. "I like it, but you forgot one thing."

"What's that?"

"It's my frame, but your headscarf. It's  _ our _ umbrella. And  _ we _ can stand under it together, even when there's no end to the storm in sight. And even if we both don't do pink."

It was Anna's turn to smile now, and they looked into each other's eyes, grinning, basking in the warmth of their nascent young love, even as the rain continued to pour…


	6. Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh realizes that he's dissatisfied with his fiancée, but there's nothing he can do about it until an old acquaintance comes into the picture. What will Yoh do?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/8/07. Revised 1/5/21.
> 
> Rating: T for strong language and mature themes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually the first chapter of a two-shot, but can be read alone as an angsty cliffhanger one-shot. Hope you enjoy!

Lost

_Kiss #6_

" _So kiss me hard, 'cause this will be the last time that I let you…"_

_-Dashboard Confessional,_ The Best Deceptions

It was barely seven o'clock, but the En Inn lay unusually dark, still and quiet in the dying grasp of twilight. The television was off, as were all of the lights, and weak wisps of feeble sunshine cast long shadows upon everything within. A stifling silence permeated the structure, and not even a floorboard dared creak to disturb it.

Yoh found himself sitting at a table in the darkness, drawn to the kitchen out of habit: Normally he would begin preparing dinner for Anna at this time of the evening, but she had left that morning for a meditative retreat and wouldn't be back until the next afternoon. "With you driving me nuts all the time, I'm long overdue for some time alone," she had said.

He, meanwhile, had no idea what to do with himself with Anna gone. Being at Anna's beck and call for so long gave him a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy, one that was now almost begging to be tapped even as he continued to sit, staring idly into the blackness. He considered cooking himself dinner despite his total lack of appetite, just to give himself something to do, and weirdly enough, his mind talked him into it. _The stuff in the fridge will spoil, I may as well cook some of it before then …_

His agile fingers washed rice in the dark, feeling each grain through toughened skin, draining the murky water and replacing it anew, until he knew from experience it was clean. He set some frozen meat to thaw in a bowl of warm water, and began mincing vegetables, throwing chunks of carrot, strips of shallot, pieces of potato, into a large pot. Soon the enticing scents of a feast in the making filled the kitchen, as Yoh continued stirring and seasoning in the darkness.

"Not bad, if I do say so myself," Yoh muttered after removing the steaming pot from the range and licking his finger. He was a slacker, but nonetheless took pride in whatever work he did. He even wiped off a shallow bowl, scooped rice and stew upon it, and set it at the table, even though he felt no compulsion to eat whatsoever. The stuffiness of the kitchen addled him, and he departed leisurely, leaving the front door slightly ajar in hopes of cooling off the interior.

Yoh looked up into the early night sky from the middle of the rock garden. No stars had yet emerged to join the sliver of moon that illuminated his surroundings, but his night vision was exceptional. He sat on a gently ridged flat rock, propping one of his ankles upon the opposite knee, and felt the crisp air moving upon his upper lip as he breathed slowly and contentedly. In Anna's absence, it was unnaturally quiet, and even in the tranquility of the rock garden he felt uneasy, as though she were glaring at him disapprovingly for twiddling his thumbs.

It was with both resentment and longing that he thought of Anna then, and the way she made him feel exhausted both in his muscles and in his soul at the end of every day with her merciless training regimen and constant berating. He shuddered to think how badly he would suffer at her hands if they were just casual acquaintances, and not two people arranged to be married.

And then, as though it had hitched a ride upon the shooting star he had just seen out of the corner of his eye and drilled itself into his mind, that word resounded within his relaxed mind: _Arranged._ His entire life, it seemed to him, had been arranged, from his shaman roots to his engagement to Anna, and all of it ran contrary to his laid-back nature. In every way he could he rebelled against the life he had been spoon-fed, from the way he let his hair grow into long, unkempt spikes, to the oversized headphones which, even under the faint moonlight, were glowing a vibrant tangerine behind his ears. But it was all meaningless, a feeble, token affectation of derailment, when he knew full well his life was still chugging down the tracks others had laid down for him…

For the first time in his life, Yoh began contemplating what his life would be like without Anna as his fiancée. Certainly she had lit, as she put it all too often, a fire under his ass, and in light of the more and more taxing challenges he seemed to face every week, he was thankful she had. But a relentless coach does not a good wife make; in fact, the very dissociation one needs to be an effective coach has the exact opposite effect in a relationship. Anna was too busy keeping herself emotionally unaffected to be both Yoh's mentor and lover, and although he didn't dare confess it to anyone, he wanted, craved, _needed_ love. Perhaps it stemmed from his parents, who never seemed to be around; maybe it hearkened back to his childhood, when he had been outcast by other kids for being able to see spirits, and rarely complimented by his grandparents during his training. He didn't know why for sure; he knew simply that the need existed within him, and Anna never satisfied it…

Then again, he knew his opinion of Anna had no bearing whatsoever on what would inevitably happen. She was a powerful shaman in her own right -- her powers rivaled and maybe even surpassed his -- and their marriage was necessary to continue the bloodline. Unless there existed another female shaman willing to take his hand in marriage, it appeared he was stuck.

The grating of feet on pavement from not far off interrupted the dead silence and roused Yoh from his deep thoughts. He squinted at the opening of the gate, waiting for the newcomer to cross the gap. A figure came into view, but much to his surprise and consternation, it did not walk on by, but instead turned inwards to face the inn. From his perch on the rock he squinted and vaguely saw a shock of pink hair coming slowly closer, moving to and fro as though looking for something, or someone…

It drew nearer, and Yoh saw the silhouetted contours of a young woman now, somehow familiar to him yet different. Her figure reminded him of Anna but her stride was nervous, a world apart from his fiancée's confident swagger. Suddenly their eyes met, and Yoh stood stock-still, unsure of what to do next. _It's so dark, for all I know she thinks she's starting at a pointy-haired rock_ …

"Yoh-sama?" the shaky voice asked, and he gave an involuntary lurch. He gave her a long stare, sizing her up, trying to see if he knew her somehow…

"A-Anna?" he asked lamely, though he knew better.

She drew closer, color beginning to register below her pink hair, and eyes now glimmered at him out of the darkness. He did a double-take and ventured another guess; he remembered now, the only pink-haired girl he knew was …

"Tamao?"

By way of a response, she closed the remaining gap between them, and Yoh could see, even in the near-total darkness, that she was grinning. "Yep," she said, her voice bubbly and anxious. "Kinda surprised you remember me, but it's good. I was afraid you'd sic Amidamaru on me."

He gave a hollow, tense laugh. "Tamao, why did you come here? Did my father send you?" he ventured, remembering that he was her mentor.

"Asakura Mikihisa-sensei? No, though he's taught me a lot. Definitely explains where you get your talent from."

Yoh shifted uncomfortably from his perch on the rock and stood up, unable to hide his nervous tic. Was it just his imagination, or did Tamao just come on to him then? "Er … okay, if not that, then why?"

"Oh, Yoh-sama … just as naïve as I remember. And I remember quite a bit. In fact," she continued breathlessly, "I haven't stopped thinking of you since the first time we met."

He was slow on the uptake sometimes, but not _that_ slow. "So you're here --"

"To see you again, yes. And to tell you that I like you. A lot."

The words were amplified both by the utter silence that followed them, and by the impact they had on Yoh's mind.

"B-b-but Tamao," he sputtered as he struggled to process what she had said, "I … I'm engaged to Anna! I thought you knew that! I …" He hesitated for a split second, but pushed on, thinking it was the right thing to say, "I love her!"

"Do you?"

Those two simple words sparked chaos in his thoughts. He really did have feelings for Anna, but he wasn't sure on what level those feelings existed. Were they merely gratitude for being tough on him when necessary, and nothing more? Or were they love?

"I … I don't know."

"Well, I've been thinking -- _eeeeek_!"

Yoh saw Tamao's figure take flight suddenly, but her foot snagged something, and she landed hard upon hundreds of jagged pebbles. "Yeow…"

"Tamao! Here, grab my arm, I'll clean you up inside …" He lifted her slender figure off the gravel, wrangling her arms about his shoulders and neck to support her, and in such a fashion they made their way to the Inn. After flicking on the light switch, he blinked, stunned at the brightness for a second, before turning his attention to the injury he had to dress.

"Have a seat, I'll be back down with some bandages in a second," he told her, sprinting upstairs. She nodded and pulled herself a chair.

As Yoh rummaged behind the bathroom mirror for some first aid supplies, he took several deep breaths. _Tamao … really likes me? I mean, I always suspected it, but … wow. What am I supposed to do now?_

The sight of a bleeding palm and knee momentarily cleared his mind of such thoughts. Yoh squatted before Tamao's chair, produced an alcohol swab and whispered, "I hope this doesn't sting too badly."

"Ahhhhh!" With her uninjured hand, she squeezed his arm as hard as she could, and for some reason the physical contact felt good in ways that made Yoh feel both exhilarated and intensely guilty. He thought he had heard a soft noise from outside, but he shrugged and began tightly wrapping Tamao's sterilized knee in gauze. Ripping off a couple lengths of medical tape, he said, "That should take care of it. Now let me see your hand."

"With pleasure," she giggled, holding out an oozing palm. Yoh winced, having received his fair share of such injuries in the past.

"I've got to pick out all the loose bits of gravel first, so the scrapes don't get infected. Hang on a second."

She nodded, and he held her hand loosely in his fingertips, feeling her soft, slim fingers, her smooth palm, and the same guilty rush he had felt earlier returned …

"Yoh … your grip is so gentle, but so firm …"

"Tamao! Alone with Yoh no less! What an … unexpected surprise."

The familiar, cold voice filled the room with the same chilly vibe that shot up Yoh's spine at that moment. The scene froze, in an interesting tableau: a blonde wearing a deadly black top and skirt, holding the front door open with white knuckles; a pink-haired girl sitting on a chair, with a black-haired boy holding her hand gently within his…

"Kyoyama Anna-sama! It's not what it looks like!" Tamao pleaded, breaking the tense silence.

"Really?" Anna's eyes narrowed at her and Yoh's linked hands, the tone of her voice more arctic than ever. "To me it looks like my fiancée is tending to your injuries. I may be hot-tempered at times but I do not jump to conclusions. However, your defensive reaction, combined with the late hour of, and lack of reason for, your visit to our home, makes me a little suspicious. And,” she went on, her eyes lingering on the bowl of food Yoh had prepared but left uneaten, “I see Yoh has prepared a meal for you as well. A perfect _gentleman_ , isn't he?" she finished, shooting both of them with freezing glares.

"N-not at all, Anna-sama! I just…I wanted to show Yoh something I discovered with my divining the other day --"

"Without your _kokkuri_ board? I must say, Tamao, if your divination is anything like your lying, you may as well stop while you're ahead and seek out a career in the fast-food industry."

The cotton-candy-colored hair atop her head rustled slightly as Tamao swallowed hard.

"Now, cut the crap. I know you've had a crush on Yoh for a long time now. It's an open secret. But Yoh and I are _engaged_ , Tamao. We're not kidding around here. Besides," she continued, her voice not warming over in the least, "you shouldn't read into Yoh's actions too deeply. He's very kind to everyone he knows, but he loves _me_. Isn't that right, Yoh?"

He froze, the bandage he had been holding tumbling to the floor, and looked anywhere but into Anna's penetrating eyes. He wanted very badly to say "yes," but he wanted even more urgently to _be_ loved, and it seemed to him Tamao had already shown more affection in the past half-hour than Anna had in fifteen years … that is, until what would happen next …

"Yoh … Oh, fuck it." With those words still hanging in the air, Anna strode forth, roughly pulled up Yoh by the nape of his neck, shoved the back of his head forward, and planted her lips firmly upon his. Were Yoh able to see anything but Anna's passionately closed eyes, he might have seen Tamao looking on with a mix of shock and horror, but instead he simply continued staring dumbfounded into the two eyelids that were shut with an intensity that matched her lips.

"A … Anna," Yoh managed at last, though he didn't know if he were asking a question, making a statement, or begging.

"I love you, dammit," she said, her voice still coming forth frozen. Without another word, without even looking back, Anna made her way out the door, with Yoh staring at the doorway long after it had shut. He could still taste traces of the first act of love Anna had ever bestowed him, and he didn't quite know what to make of it, or even if it had actually happened. Despite discovering both Tamao's latent affection for him and Anna's sudden passion, Yoh felt more lost than ever.

Tamao spoke then, reminding him that she was still there, and all his troubles sprang back to mind with her voice. "Yoh …"

_Continues in "Found," Kiss #7._


	7. Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this emotional conclusion to "Lost," Yoh has a revelation and realizes what he must do to solve his relationship woes…
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/8/07. Revised 1/6/21.
> 
> Rating: T for mature themes and mild language.

Found

_ Kiss #7 _

" _ I know that you hope for longer goodbyes, embracing for forever, and falling in your eyes…" _

- _ Dashboard Confessional,  _ " Living In Your Letters"

Tamao tried again, clearing her throat and getting up, supporting herself on her good leg. "Yoh-sama, I'm sorry, I never should have come here."

"No, I understand, Tamao," Yoh said, shaking his head. "Like Anna said, you've had a crush on me for a while. I mean, that's the kind of thing you can keep to yourself only for so long."

She smiled sweetly, and perhaps it was only because Anna rarely did it, or maybe because Yoh was beginning to notice that Tamao had become a lot prettier since he last saw her, but he was disarmed for a second by it. "You really are very understanding. Very sweet." She placed her unbandaged hand upon Yoh's gently and continued, "Maybe it's wrong of me to still be here, but I do know one thing, Yoh-sama. You deserve somebody who cherishes you for who you are, not someone who pummels you for not being who they wish you were."

Yoh tried to deny it, but knew deep within himself that she was at least partly right. That desire for love that had flashed within him earlier now threatened to burn through his skin and singe the hand that was still lightly placed upon his…

Perhaps the turmoil in his mind was reflected in his face, for Tamao hesitated, withdrew her hand, and began limping toward the door. "I'm sorry, Yoh-sama. I shouldn’t undermine Anna like this. But I can’t stand the thought of such a wonderful young man being stuck with such a cruel mistress.” She was nearly outside as she said, “Thank you for tending to my injuries and hearing me out, Yoh-sama. You know where to find me if you need anything."

And she left him alone once more, standing before the kitchen table, his mouth agape, drifting like so much debris in an ocean of conflicting thoughts, the chaos threatening to rend his head asunder. With a vast effort, he shook his head and found himself in his bedroom, for some reason holding a black obelisk in his hands. A vaporous stream began to flow from it, which coalesced in the nothingness before Yoh into the form of a familiar samurai.

"Yoh-dono! It is most unusual for you to require my services at this hour. Nonetheless, I sense something is amiss. What troubles you?"

Now that Amidamaru was looking at him with concern, Yoh had no idea where to begin. "Err … do you remember Tamao? Bright pink hair, little shorter than me, ascetic diviner?"

"Ah!" Amidamaru replied. "Tamamura-sama! But do tell, Yoh-dono, how she relates to the burden that clearly weighs heavily on your mind?"

"Well, you see … it turns out that she likes me. A lot."

The spirit made as though he had just dodged a mortal strike. "But Yoh-dono, that is unthinkable! You must marry Anna-sama --"

"Why?" Yoh interrupted, more loudly and fiercely than he had meant to, but all of his thoughts were now pouring out of him at Amidamaru's provocation. "In a half-hour with Tamao, she made me feel more wanted, more  _ loved _ than ever before! Anna's had her chance for years now. Why should I stick it out for her anymore?"

Amidamaru looked almost pained, and it carried into his voice. "Yoh-dono, I mean no disrespect, but Anna-sama loves you more than anybody."

"Yeah?" Yoh demanded, unable to keep the bitterness out of his speech any longer. "Then why's she always so angry at me? Why doesn't she ever bother to express the love she supposedly feels for me?"

"Well, it is often said," the samurai mused, "that anger is simply love's disappointment. And she will naturally be disappointed in you quite often, given her lofty expectations for you. And as for the lack of expressed feelings, there are many different ways of showing love. Some are more subtle than others."

"But she's always so detached from her feelings! Someone that cold can't possibly even  _ feel _ love, much less be  _ in _ love."

"Yoh-dono, with all due respect, you of all people should know that we all hide our true feelings behind masks now and then! How unbearable life would be if we had no option but to wear our emotions on our sleeves! Tao Ren-sama puts on an air of reckless, relentless bravado to conceal the fact that he is hurting. Anna-sama acts the part of the frigid dominatrix to distance herself from you because she cannot bear the thought of losing you." Amidamaru looked at Yoh with avuncular eyes, nurturing and honest, and continued. "You yourself hide behind laziness and try to convince everyone around you, and yourself to some extent, that you care not about becoming Shaman King, because some part of you feels incapable of accomplishing such a feat."

Yoh remained silent, taking in Amidamaru's words with interest. Finally he said, "But … but … now that you mention Tao Ren. In my match against him, Anna stayed home, but Tamao came to her and begged her to support me in person. Why --"

"Ah, Yoh-dono, remember. Anna-sama distances herself from you because the thought of losing you is too much for her to countenance. She invited Tamamura-sama over, so she wouldn't have to be alone while you battled. Furthermore, speaking of Tamamura-sama, Anna-sama asked her to divine your fate while you were working to increase your mana alone in the cave. She worries about you, Yoh-dono. Just not to your face. She fears if you know how precious you are to her, you will stop putting yourself in danger and abandon your dream of becoming Shaman King. It all makes sense, no?"

Yoh thought of how warm Tamao's hand had felt, lightly placed upon his, then thought about how everything about Anna seemed cold in comparison -- her glares, her voice, the way she carried herself. Although he followed Amidamaru's logic, he couldn't help but wonder -- but not fantasize, as he felt too guilty about calling it that -- about how he might be happier with someone else …

He suddenly felt tired, and he lied down on his bedroll. Vaguely aware that Amidamaru had begun talking, but too deluged with fatiguing thoughts to really listen anymore, he put out a hand to wave him off. The spirit, however, moved to his outstretched hand and Yoh thought he felt another presence in his soul before he drifted off into a fitful yet dream-filled sleep …

The delicate, veiled morning sun filtered through the living room window. Anna sat facing it, holding up a black garment to the light. "Have you seen my thimble anywhere, Amidamaru?"

"I'm sorry, I have not, Anna-sama."

"Amidamaru, you’re like family to me by now. You don’t have to be so formal."

"But to address you otherwise would be disrespectful beyond words, Anna-sama! I have the utmost gratitude for you and your fiance for restoring my irreplaceable sword, Harusame, and reuniting me with my dear friend Mosuke.”

“Fine, I guess.” Anna sighed and turned her attention back to the task at hand. “But I can't believe I lost my thimble! I'm not much of a seamstress, so this is a painful learning experience." She flattened one of the tears in the cloth against her knee and began stitching it shut. "Oww! Dammit, first stitch and already my finger's a pincushion." She sucked the red spots on her finger with a frown.

"Anna-sama, perhaps a trip to the local alteration shop is in order?"

She shook her head. "I made this outfit with my own two hands, and I couldn't touch anything for a week afterwards. This way, a little bit of me goes with Yoh, no matter where he is."

The samurai paused in midair. "That's quite a sentimental gesture on your part. I never would have expected … but I speak candidly, Anna-sama. I apologize."

"What are you implying?" she asked, her tone both simultaneously heated and freezing.

"N-nothing, Anna-sama. Forgive me my indiscretion --"

"You question my love for Yoh, don't you?" The query was a lance of ice, penetrating and cold, and the spirit looked wounded.

"I -- The matter is none of my business, Anna-sama."

"The hell it isn't!" she shot back. "I will not have my fiancé's partner doubting me! Amidamaru, let me get one thing straight with you," she continued, her voice an intense, chilly whisper, "I love Yoh."

He nearly thought better of it, but her outburst had struck one of the samurai's nerves, and he blurted out, "Well, it's reassuring to hear you declare it for once."

Rather than react with anger as he had expected, Anna appeared suddenly contrite. "Amidamaru, have you ever heard the tale of my childhood?"

"I am afraid I have never."

"I'm an orphan, Amidamaru. Yoh's grandparents recognized my potential as a spirit medium, luckily, and they took me in." Her voice was flat, as though she were reading aloud the ingredient panel from the back of a box of cereal. "I was cursed, with an  _ oni _ , a demon, who would appear when I least expected it. You can imagine how many friends I had, what with my tendency to randomly summon a bloodthirsty demon in the middle of hide-and-seek."

Amidamaru gazed intently at Anna, but her expression was as blank and neutral as her voice.

"Nearly six years ago, I met Yoh for the first time. He came to visit; I guess his grandparents thought it would be a good idea for him to actually meet the person he'd been arranged to marry. Anyhow, my  _ oni _ sprang forth during the visit, but unlike everyone else, he stood his ground against the demon and swore to exorcise it from my soul. Yoh was the first person to care about the girl who existed behind the  _ oni _ , to treat me with dignity, and not like some kind of possessed … freak."

Anna had nearly choked on her last word but regained her composure after a deep breath.

"I owe my life to Yoh for what he did that day. I always have, and always will, love him. And after every fight I mend his battle outfit, trying not to think of … of how close he'd come to losing … and how close I'd come to losing him …"

Anna blinked her watery eyes as she fell silent, staring down at the damaged masterwork in her lap. Amidamaru appeared touched, but he was determined to press just a bit further. "Yoh-dono deserves, after all he has done for you, to at least know his feelings for you are mutual."

Anna said nothing, and suddenly became very interested in a pair of deep rends on the front of the outfit. She threaded her needle and bit her lip when she felt its sting in her finger once more … or maybe the truth of Amidamaru’s words was needling her as well ...

"Anna-sama,” the samurai finished, “perhaps it is time to try … a little tenderness."

"Amidamaru, I don't have time for this!" she shouted, then gasped when she realized how loudly she had yelled. "I -- I didn't mean to yell … it's just that these rips here are pretty deep, and I'm going to need to get some more bleach and black dye, to get rid of these … these …"

Amidamaru looked over Anna's shoulder and saw the rends in the outfit, surrounded by a red stain that was evident even upon the black cloth. He was about to say something, but at that moment he noticed Anna had bowed her head, and her body began to quiver.

Anna stared down at the mass of stained black cloth in her lap through blurred eyes, watching as warm drops fell upon it from her face, turning deep red when they ran into the stains, attempting and failing to purify them …

The first thing Yoh did when he woke up was open his closet. There, behind a couple of his collared school uniform shirts, was his black combat suit. He ran his fingers over the sleek material fondly, marveling at how impeccably each stitch had been placed. He squinted at where the deep gashes from his fight against Faust VIII had been, the ones that had reduced two of his ribs to shards of bone meal, and grabbed the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. There was definitely stitching there, but it had been done with a precise, intense passion, albeit one that was almost undetectable …

He took the hanger off the rack, stepped into the jet-black shorts, and slid into the sleeveless top. It fit snugly, but not too tightly, and felt reassuringly warm. He turned to the mirror and saw himself -- and another figure dressed in black.

"Yoh." Anna's voice was unreadable, as usual, and her face worthy of the final table at any poker tournament.

"Anna! You're back early!"

"For the second time. It's harder than you might think to meditate when you're worried your fiancé is having an affair. Although frankly I'm surprised Tamao isn't present for this second surprise visit. You put that on to try to impress her, or something?"

Her unruffled reaction threw Yoh off. He didn't quite know where Anna stood, but decided it didn't really matter, and that he had to try to make things right anyway …

"Anna … One of us is impressed, but it's not Tamao." He walked up to Anna coyly and grasped her left hand. She drew back slightly, and, expecting a slap, so did Yoh; but her free hand remained at her side. He looked at her fingers, felt their tips with his, and ran the most calloused one upon his battle dress, pausing as he searched for the right spot, and ran her finger across the two gashes she had mended for him.

She looked up at him, businesslike, but soon a smile revealed itself upon her lips. "You lost your thimble," he whispered, "but what I found in return …"

Anna's fingers moved from the mended spot on his outfit to the back of her head. She scratched it, almost bashfully. "I always knew I couldn't trust Amidamaru," she replied softly, "but he was right."

Yoh caressed the small of Anna's back, almost able to feel the adrenaline rushing through her spine upon his fingertips. "About what?"

"It is time to try," she answered, her warm hand tickling at the back of Yoh's neck, "a little tenderness."

Then Yoh offered a better apology and explanation for last night with his lips than he ever could have expressed with his clumsy words, and Anna welcomed it, knew it was true by the gentle passion she felt upon her tongue, and herself offered up an apology for being so emotionally distant by rubbing his back in delicate circles …

They had a lot to atone for, and their lips remained locked for a long while, Anna's hands feeling the nubs and ridges where she had mended his clothes, sick with worry; but it was all right, he was alive, in fact more alive to her than he had ever been. She felt his spiky hair brushing against her face, felt a rush of energy shoot up her arm as Yoh's fingertips crawled down it, until both of his hands were cradling her left index finger, slightly swollen and tough from countless pinpricks.

"The way a needle must have thread, the way a tailor loves his thimble," Yoh whispered, "that is how I feel about you, Anna. You thought you lost your thimble, but I will always be here to shield you from pain, because … I love you."

"Oh, Yoh … I love you too," she choked, weeping silently into Yoh's uniform as she had so many weeks ago, but this time the uniform was undamaged and he was there, feeling the drops of warmth soaking into his shoulder, and then she felt his moist cheek rub the side of her face …


	8. The Hungering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While camping, Yoh forages for food ... but are there some appetites that can't be satiated by eating?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/10/07. Revised 1/7/21.
> 
> Rating: T for romantic themes and coarse language.

The Hungering

_Kiss #8_

" _I'd buy you a little fuzzy bunny … if you … realize you don't have to be so pissed."_

_-The Ataris,_ "You Need A Hug"

The straps of Yoh's backpack chafed as though they were sandpaper upon his shoulders, and mosquitoes nipped at his copious sweat as he trudged on, every step sapping a little more of his energy under the merciless early afternoon sun. Suddenly, he felt a sharp prodding in his lower back …

"Get the lead out, lazybones," Anna ordered, jabbing at him with a walking stick that she was now brandishing like a spear.

Yoh stood a little straighter and lengthened his stride slightly, but not by much, and he swatted at mosquitoes halfheartedly as the pair came to a turn in the trail. "Why are we going on a hike anyway? Wouldn't you be more comfortable watching TV or something?" he asked, a touch bitterly. "I myself don't mind a little exercise, but the uphill, and the sun, and the mosquitoes --"

"Are exactly why we're hiking," she finished for him. "In modern-day Japan, it's easy to forget that the path of the shaman has existed for thousands of years. Our ancestors never had the luxury of electricity, of running water, of microwaves and automobiles. Sometimes," she continued, her usually stoic face now looking up, with what almost looked like a joyful expression, to the thin canopy of leaves above, "we need to get away from it all and live the way our forebears did."

"Huh? We used to own four bears?"

"Our ancestors," she snapped, shifting her gaze back down to Yoh, any trace of happiness gone. "Idiot."

Yoh rubbed his backside where Anna's walking stick had just prodded him again. "Okay, okay, geez …"

"You know, there's plenty here that even a slacker like yourself can appreciate. The seeds of these trees, for instance." The vaguely cheerful expression returned to Anna's face as she continued, "They sprout, mature, then fall from the branches, moving mere feet in their entire lifetime, yet have the potential to be reborn as new sprouts with the next rainfall…" As Anna spoke, Yoh felt the grime and sweat disheveling his hair, blotching his skin and marring his face, but noticed how pretty his fiancée still was under the same circumstances. Her skin glowed faintly with a thin layer of healthy perspiration, causing her hair to stick to her cheeks and temples in a cute fashion, and the simple white shirt she had donned was clinging to her figure, exposing to him in detailed relief the shape of her every curve, the magnitude of every contour --

"Ouch! Would you cut it out with that damn walking stick already?!"

"Yoh, you're not even listening to me!"

"I -- You got me there," he shrugged.

Anna's knuckles, he noticed, whitened considerably upon her walking stick.

"Okay, I see what you’re getting at," he quickly added.

"That's what I thought. As I was saying, I think this'll be a nice change of pace from being surrounded by glass and concrete all day."

"Wow…" Yoh blinked. "Another good point."

They had reached a clearing, where the bushes and shrubs receded to border a grassy plain, and in the center towered a magnificent tree, its trunk knurled and ribbed and mossy with age, cresting into a verdant cascade of leaves some thirty feet above.

"Right," Anna said once they had sat in the shade of the tree for a few minutes. "I'll start pitching the tent. Yoh, you better start cooking lunch."

He nodded and cast off his backpack, giving a little sigh as cool air rushed into his back cavity. "Okay. Just pass me your pack and I'll get started."

She looked up, unconsciously dropping a few tent pegs into the grass, and a delicate frown marred her brow. "Huh? What for?"

"Well, I can't cook food when it's still in your backpack." He favored her with a corny grin, but she didn't reply in kind.

"No, the food should be in yours, remember? I left all the cans on the kitchen table for you to pack."

"I … uh …" Yoh unzipped his backpack and ransacked its contents, breathing out with a surge of relief as his hands closed around several tin cans. "Huh, guess I did."

Anna picked up one of the small cans and read the label. "Sternum™ brand Fuel In A Can. Heat anything, burns for hours … Yoh, you're shitting me, right? This is just one of those jokes you're always pulling that I don't get?"

"Well …" But his hemming and hawing was unnecessary; she knew the truth.

"Yoh." She slammed her own backpack into the grass, kicking up dead foliage and motes of dirt. "I swear you were at home picking your nose on the day they passed out the brains." A hatchet appeared from the depths of her backpack and she shoved it at Yoh, stopping it mere inches before it contacted him. "You are going to find us something to eat. You will not come back empty-handed. I don't care if you have to behead a mountain lion. I don't care if you hack off your left ass cheek and tell me it's a pork chop."

Yoh's head was bowed with shame, and he took the hatchet from her extended hand without shifting his gaze from the ground. "Yes, Anna."

He heard the violent hammering of tent pegs grow fainter as he ventured deeper into the woods, the trembling hatchet in his hands an embodiment of Anna's sharp words to him…

The mid-afternoon sun cast a brilliant golden light upon the greenery, but Yoh didn't notice. "If only Amidamaru could help me now … Stupid useless hatchet …" His stomach complained loudly, rumbling with hunger, and it didn't help any that his hunting had yielded nothing but a pocketful of questionable berries that he had decided to carry uneaten until he could deduce whether or not they were poisonous. Soon, however, he noticed a low rumbling that wasn't coming from his stomach.

"Running water," he mumbled. With no other ideas, and realizing his hatchet wasn't likely to fell any game soon, he tracked the sound to its source. The sight of the clear, slow-moving stream imbued the exhausted shaman with a second wind, and he jogged to its bank, gazing down at his own fragmented reflection, and he saw dark, narrow shapes darting to and fro …

"Fish! If only I knew how to catch them …" And egged on by desperation, or perhaps the heat, or maybe even the grimy film he felt clinging to his skin, he dived in, clawing madly at his scaled prey, but they evaded his clumsy swipes. He tried again, but the spooked fish merely dodged once more.

"Crap. They make this look so easy in manga," he grumbled, fingering a drop of water out of his ear. The water was chilly, but it was a refreshing cold that kick-started his heart and stung his nerves to life. "Maybe Anna was right about this whole nature thing…it's so relaxing here, so peaceful. I feel … alive …"

His brain no longer fatigued, he thought out his next course of action. "I have no net, so I need a fishing pole, and bait, and I don't have any of those things … Wait!" Hit by a sudden wave of inspiration, Yoh crawled back out of the river, plucked a couple of berries out of his pocket, crushed one slightly, and threw it into the shadowy school of fish at the opposite bank. The black mass scattered, but slowly regrouped around the ripple Yoh's berry had made.

"Ha, guess these are edible after all," he chuckled, crushing a second berry and tossing it a few feet shorter. His prey obediently shifted their position, and in such a fashion Yoh lured them to his feet. "Here I go," he whispered, dropping the last berry into the water. He could see individual fish now, their silvery scales shining when they neared the surface, their fins pulsating as they glided forward, their gills opening and closing with the current…

Arches of water droplets cascaded off the object that squirmed in Yoh's hands, causing him to squint as he wrestled with it.

"No…" Its caudal fin undulated violently, like a pendulum on overdrive, as he struggled to maintain a grip on its slimy midsection.

"You…" It gave a final, powerful jerk and flopped feebly on the grass, its gills expanding desperately.

"Don't!" Yoh picked up the fish and held it above his head triumphantly, as though he were a fireplace and the fish were stuffed and mounted. It felt gooey and unpleasant in his hands, but he didn't care; he had found something to eat, and maybe it would be enough to hold Anna over for a few hours.

Something rustled in the bushes at that moment, and Yoh picked up his hatchet out of instinct. He stared at the shrubs intently, motionless, dripping water onto the grass, and two furry white ears like flower petals emerged …

"Aww, it's an _usagi_! C'mere, little fella …"

The leaves of the bush parted slightly, revealing the rabbit's head, and then its body, bit by bit, until the entire critter bounded forth with an energetic bounce. Its wide, beady eyes looked first at the hand that was beckoning it forth, then at the other hand clenched around the hatchet. For a moment, it quivered hesitantly, bobbing its tail as it decided what to do -- but suddenly, it leapt towards Yoh in a downy white flash.

"That's it, little buddy, just a little closer. I'm just going to pet you …" Yoh could see its delicately twitching pink nose now, and its whiskers, merrily wriggling like chaff in a breeze, as it hopped even nearer.

Yoh saw a window of opportunity crack open. There was a sudden glint of steel and a flurry of severed vegetation as Yoh's hatchet slashed before him, and bright red ichor splattered onto his hands and upon the ground…

* * *

Yoh made out an olive green shape through the branches and gave a small sigh of relief; the sun was nearly completely below the horizon now, and the trees had all begun to look alike. He had removed his damp shirt to use as a makeshift sack to hold the food he had scavenged. His backpack straps had given his bare shoulders a slight friction burn, but the pain lifted once he realized he had found his way back. He poked his head into the tent, expecting to find a livid and starving Anna, but saw only two sleeping bags, one of them with an Anna-sized impression still in it.

Yoh saw, against the sunset, a silhouette sitting on a flat rock. There was something on her lap, and she was too absorbed with it to have seen him. He crept forward, intrigued, and Anna looked up suddenly, but in the opposite direction, squinting into the orange abyss of the sunset. Then she glanced back down. Yoh’s eyes followed hers, and then he saw the pencil in her hands sketching lines and shapes onto the sketchpad upon her lap.

He was only a foot or so behind her now, and he could hear the sound of graphite gliding on paper. Yoh gradually widened his focus from the tip of Anna’s pencil to the rest of the page; he could make out a tree, one that looked very much like the one near their tent, and a male figure with spiky hair and a large pair of headphones standing, almost leaning, over a shorter figure with a slender waist, but that image was incomplete.

"Anna, I … I didn't know you drew so well." The words were out of his mouth before he could stop himself.

She lurched forward, nearly losing her perch on the rock, slammed the sketchpad shut and rounded on Yoh. Her eyes were colored with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, but they saw his admiring, awed face, still staring at where her sketch had been, and then she noticed his bare chest, slim but well-defined, and golden in the glory of the sunset. Perhaps she was slightly sunburned, or maybe there was some other reason why her skin suddenly looked so pink …

"Yoh, I would tell you to go jump in a lake," she said, after a moment's hesitation, "but from the looks of it, you already have."

"Can I … maybe, see more of your drawings?" he stammered. "That's amazing, I wish I were talented like that …"

Anna's skin flushed a deeper shade of red. "I hope you found something to eat."

"I'm not sure if you’ll like this," he said, "but it’s better than nothing, right?" He withdrew the fish from the folds of his shirt. It bent over limply in Yoh's hand, as slimy and unpleasant as ever.

"Not one of my favorites, but it'll do." She picked it up nonchalantly, drew a pocket knife and made an incision on its underside. Yoh gave an involuntary cringe as its entrails dripped out. "There's definitely something wrong with you. I give you a hatchet and you bring me a fish. Maybe tomorrow I'll give you a fishing pole and you can bring me back a bear. You find anything else?"

"Yeah, I found this too. Was pretty messy to get, but I did it anyway."

As Yoh reached into the shirt to pull it out, an alabaster streak jumped out from the bushes, sniffing the air intently, looking for its friend …

"A sweet potato," Yoh finished, handing the purple lump to Anna, but her attention had been diverted.

"Look!"

The bunny looked up at Yoh with beseeching eyes and rubbed its warm, fuzzy body against his smooth leg. With an affectionate smile, he reached down and coddled it, scratching it behind the ears and stroking its soft fur.

Anna stood up and bent over the snow-white critter to get a closer look. She tickled the bunny with her knuckles, and it closed its eyes contentedly, drawing back its ears to express its comfort. "Yoh," she asked, her voice tinged with shock and delight, "how come this rabbit came to you?"

"Well," he said, sounding a little embarrassed, "I fed it some sweet potato leaves. They have this really thick red sap, it stains everything it touches, but … Look at it! I couldn't _not_ feed it, I mean … it's just a little fuzzy ball of joy, don't you think?"

Anna smiled at the rabbit and tentatively put a hand under its belly, making to pick it up. When it didn’t resist, she followed through, and looked up at Yoh, still smiling, rabbit in tow. "And you thought I'd be happier watching TV." She placed the bunny on the rock, where it sat, its pink nose still bouncing with delight.

"Nature isn't so bad, I guess," Yoh replied, smiling a little himself and giving Anna a meaningful look. "There are all kinds of cute, cuddly things to find there, that I want to hold in my arms forever …"

"Yoh, that's so … corny."

"I know," he admitted. "But I just couldn't think of any other way to describe the way you look, right now, with your blonde hair against the sunset, giving me that smile that I'd do anything to see, and how you make me feel when you look at me like that, and how I'm too afraid to tell you I love you --"

"I love you too, Yoh."

"Oops --"

Anna looked at him with the same stare she had given him so many times before, but rarely if ever had it felt so passionate, and certainly never before had her arms been around his bare back. For a brief moment they stood perfectly still, simply looking into each other's eyes, and then Anna's face rose to meet his, and she could taste the dried sweat, the essence of the effort he had expended to feed her, but a different appetite welled within her chest then as Yoh worked up the courage to place his hands in the small of her back, and the desire to express and receive what they both felt for each other consumed him as well. The hungering had never before been satiated, but Anna gave with her tender hands and gentle lips, and it was her turn to receive Yoh's timid but affectionate tongue, his nervous but sincere caresses …

The hungering was gone, but they both knew it would resurface very soon as feelings of love are wont to do. Anna sat in front of Yoh, her back supported by his bare chest, his arms draped about her shoulders. She grinned, stroking his chin lovingly, and said, "Well, I think the bunny's _way_ too young to have seen that."

Yoh laughed. "Are you kidding me? You know the saying, 'mate like bunnies’?"

"I know the saying, and sometimes it can apply to … other living things," Anna said with a wink.

"Oh, so like … giraffes? And rhinos?"

" _Sigh_ … Yoh, I can't believe someone so sweet can be so clueless sometimes …"


	9. Chemistry Lesson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh knows that Anna's freakishly good mood has to come with strings attached …
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/12/07. Revised 1/8/21.
> 
> Rating: T for innuendo, mild language and romantic themes.

Chemistry Lesson

_ Kiss #9 _

Beads of clear water glided off Yoh's smooth cheeks and down his forearms. He shook his head dry and dabbed fruitlessly at a wet spot on his shirt with his towel. He was accustomed to the brutal summer heat that left the house feeling like an oven even in the mornings, but today was different -- the temperature was, if not cool, then almost pleasant. It put him in a relatively good mood despite knowing what he had to do next; he whistled to himself tunelessly as he ambled down the staircase, making his way toward the kitchen to prepare breakfast --

Anna was standing at the kitchen table, placing a few sealed containers into a basket. She looked very strangely relaxed, even happy, as she closed the lid on the basket and looked up to the foot of the staircase with a pleasant face. "Good morning, Yoh."

"Er --” He was unaccustomed to receiving warm greetings from her, or warm anythings for that matter, with the exception of slaps that left his face stinging with heat. "Um … same to you, Anna." Not really sure of what else to do, he gave a slight bow.

Anna slung a rolled-up mat over her shoulder, covering her solid white halter top, and giggled at Yoh's formal bow. He shook his head slightly: _Did she just giggle?!_ _And I've never seen Anna wearing such provocative clothing…though I wish she would more often…_

"C'mon, don't just stand there," Anna ordered, although in a much more playful tone than she usually employed to make such commands. "Here, help me carry this basket."

Yoh awkwardly grasped the thatched basket's bamboo handle, carrying it in front of him like a basinet. He was still very unsettled by Anna's cheerful, warm demeanor; it was a bit like waking up and noticing the sky had turned blood-red. But he found as soon as he stepped outside that the sky was still a majestic, uninterrupted azure, the air a tad warm but not chokingly humid.

"Um…Anna?"

She turned to face him, and he had never seen her look as attractive before. Her straw-colored hair seemed to absorb the warmth of the morning sun and her happiness, and the very pupils of her eyes beamed affection into his. "Yes?"

"Erm, if you don't mind me asking … why are you in such a good mood today?"

Anna laughed heartily, as though unaware that her usual disposition ranged from cold and uncaring to downright frigid and furious. "It's perfect weather for a picnic, and it's no fun having one alone, silly!"

She said it in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone that confused him even more.  _ Since when does Anna bring me along for picnics? _

"Look at this, Yoh. Not a cloud in the sky! And just wait till you see what I've got for you in that basket …"

Anna continued to make eerily cheerful comments and observations as they drew nearer to the park, and Yoh did his best to restrain himself from grasping Anna about her delicate shoulders and demanding, "Who are you and what have you done to my fiancée?!" After about ten minutes of the most out-of-character peppiness he had ever experienced, they crossed the street and entered the park.

"Aw! I forgot to bring the kite," Anna lamented as they made their way past packs of animated children with sidewalk chalk and jump ropes, several black smoke-belching barbeques, and more than a fair share of couples sitting in rather conspicuous places engaging in behavior all too explicit to describe in a story rated "T."

They arrived at a knoll of thick, lush grass, shaded by a crooked tree, and overlooking the placid lake just a few feet away. Anna spread out her mat and sat upon it, gesturing for Yoh to join her. He sat, tense, unable to enjoy the shade, the perfect weather, the crystal-clear lake, or, most of all, Anna's totally uncharacteristic kindness.

But Anna didn't notice his inner turmoil. She simply opened the picnic basket and withdrew several  _ bento _ containers overflowing with all sorts of goodies. Through the clear plastic he could see juicy marinated strips of  _ teppanyaki _ , black-clad rolls of assorted sushi, pickled  _ daikon _ radishes glowing a strangely appetizing fluorescent yellow…

"I made it all yesterday when you were out running. I think I made enough for both of us, so help yourself."

Yoh blinked at the feast, segregated in containers and spread out upon the mat.  _ Anna actually cooked? _ He couldn't help himself any longer. Clearing his throat as casually as he could manage, he asked timidly yet pointedly, "Are … are you all right, Anna?"

"Me?" She pointed at herself with a pair of ivory-colored  _ hashi _ . "Never better," she grinned.

Upon seeing her brilliant smile, Yoh hesitated for a brief moment, stunned, but forced himself to press on. "Please, Anna, be straight up with me. You and I both know we  _ never _ go on picnics or anything when there's training to be done. So what's the deal?"

The smile on her face wavered, but surprisingly was replaced by an even more rarefied countenance. Her lips pursed together, her shoulders sagged ever so slightly, and her brow wrinkled in a gesture of concern, even… _ Pity?  _ Yoh wondered.

"Yoh," she said, her tone serious yet still warm. "They sent a mission of Shinto priests to Shinra Private Academy yesterday. The principal sent for them after he received complaints about … troubling spirits."

"Um …" Yoh knew by Anna's tone that this was grave news somehow, but he couldn't quite comprehend why.

"Think about it for a minute. When do you usually interact with the spirits at school?"

He gave a bashful grin. "Whenever I need to take a test. If they weren't there to bail me out, I'd never pass --"

Yoh's marbleized chopsticks landed on the mat with a dull thud, echoing the heartbeats he could hear reverberating in his eardrums in time with his constricted, shallow breaths.

"Yoh … I know it seems hopeless, but I'm not completely heartless, you know," Anna said after a few moments of silence. She tried to console Yoh, placing a tender hand upon his motionless arm, but even that failed to revive him from his shock and panic.

She withdrew several thick hardcover books from the bottom of the picnic basket. Handing a notebook and pen to Yoh, she said, "I … I'm willing to help get you up to speed so you don't fail, but, well … it's up to you to learn this stuff. I can't force you."

He reached out for the notebook with a pale, quivering hand; his mind had just gone blank, save for the occasional thought of his grandparents denying the existence of their buffoon of a grandson …

"Let's start with some math," she offered, cracking open the respective textbook. "How much do you remember from class?"

Yoh stared at the page of problems. Every number, every  _ x  _ and every  _ y _ , seemed to crowd his brain just a little more, until the symbols and digits lost all meaning and became a muddle of unrelated, random squiggles of ink. He blinked, forced himself to take a deep breath, and reminded himself that Anna believed in him, was willing to help him in his hour of need…

"Not much," he admitted. He jotted the first problem down and, after a few seconds of calculation, scribbled his solution beneath his arithmetic.

Anna looked at the problem and gave a weak smile. "That's correct. Well, nice to know you don't spend the  _ entire _ day napping at your desk. Try the next one."

Yoh tried the same approach as he had with the first one, but couldn't make any headway. Seeing his struggle, Anna suggested, "Try substitution."

He glanced up from his notebook to give Anna a blank stare.

"Don't know how to do that? How about elimination? You just need to make sure your coefficients --"

"What did you just call me?"

Anna sighed. "Never mind. Let's move on to the next chapter. Maybe it'll jog your memory," she said, impatience and the familiar coldness beginning to creep into her voice …

She jabbed at a problem with her slender index finger. "Show me what you got."

Sensing Anna's disappointment, Yoh willed the equation  _ 2x² + 31x - 8  _ to take on some bigger, cosmic meaning, to solve itself, but he knew he hadn't the foggiest idea how to make it so.

"Remember the quadratic equation?" admonished Anna in a reproachful tone. She wrote it on her notepad and pushed it towards him. He squinted at Anna's handwriting, but couldn't make head or tail of it, and not just because it was somewhat sloppily jotted down.

"Negative b, plus and minus … Wait a minute, how can you have plus  _ and  _ minus? Wouldn't they cancel each other out? And what's this squiggly line thing?"

"Plus  _ or _ minus! And -- wait, you're kidding, right?"

"No! What the hell is that?"

"A square root!"

"Roots aren't square! Carrots aren't square, radishes aren't square --"

"Oh, forget it!" The last remaining traces of Anna's patience evaporated as she slammed the math textbook shut. "I hope you do better with Japanese literature than you did with math."

Yoh frowned at the dense passages in his textbook, wondering how on Earth the publisher had managed to cram so many  _ kanji _ with such a small font size onto a single page. He licked his lips and began reading aloud, " _ But …  _ um …  _ Shinnosuke had been raised in the outskirts of Edo, a  _ … something …  _ land where  _ … something something …  _ prevailed. The …  _ something …  _ code of Bushido was a mere …  _ something …  _ to them --" _

"YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ THOSE  _ KANJI _ ?!" Anna bellowed, wrenching the book from Yoh's lap incredulously. "I can't believe … Yoh, I learned that one in fifth grade … and this one, you see all the time … This one's so important, you can't write any decent story without using it at least ten times …"

Yoh swallowed hard, blinking rapidly, looking down at the coarse weaving of the mat beneath him. His voice was small and hoarse. "Anna … I know, it's pathetic, but I swear I'll learn every last one of those  _ kanji _ , and that quadratic thing, and all about those coefficients or whatever … so long as you're willing to teach me, I'll listen."

She gave him a steely glare, but insulted Yoh's intellect no further. Instead she shut the Japanese literature text firmly and picked up a chemistry book. "Let's start from the very beginning," she instructed, trying to keep the despair out of her voice. "Balancing chemical reactions."

Yoh looked at the questions and began scribbling his answers into his notebook. Anna checked them: it was basic, fundamental stuff, but nonetheless his pace was rapid and his answers were all correct.

Anna, realizing that she had been silent with shock, blurted out, "Yoh … you're not cheating or anything?"

"Nah," he replied, feeling a mote of pride welling up in his chest at Anna's surprised tone. "I like chemistry. It's kind of cool. Sort of like alchemy, except it actually works."

Taken aback by Yoh’s response, Anna flipped ahead in the textbook to a random page, as if determined to dismiss his earlier success as a fluke. But Yoh continued to glide along through the exercises without so much as a grunt. Anna too said nothing, and kneeled behind Yoh, watching him work, wondering how a dunce at mathematics and literature could possibly recall the Ideal Gas Law from memory, or remember his atomic weights without checking the periodic table …

Finally Yoh tripped up slightly while solving a thermodynamics question. He wrote,  _ Change in energy = -560 kJ/mol. Reaction is spontaneous and endothermic. _

Until Anna spoke, the only sound had been Yoh's pen scraping against his notebook, along with a suppressed gasp here and there where Yoh had solved an entire page of problems without so much as reviewing the "Index of Useful Information" at the back of the book. "Actually," she said, breaking the silence, sounding more surprised than disappointed at his incorrect answer, "that would be exothermic. Remember, 'endothermic' means it absorbs heat, it gains energy, it becomes colder. 'Exothermic' means it releases energy, it gets hotter."

Yoh crossed out "endothermic" on his notepad and wrote the correct answer. "Ah, that's right. I always get those two confused."

Anna looked at Yoh intently. There was something she wanted to ask him. She hesitated, but forced herself to ask. "Yoh … How can you do so well at chem, but not know what a square root is?"

He looked at her thoughtfully. "Chem … makes sense to me. The way atoms form molecules and interact with each other is like putting together pieces of a universal puzzle. But math, and these  _ kanji _ , they make no sense at all in my head. Learning them is just impossible. When I try, I feel like a foreigner trying to visit Japan after Tokugawa Iemitsu issued his Sakoku Edict of 1635. It’s just impossible.”

Anna did a violent double take. "Wait. After  _ who _ issued his  _ what _ ?"

Anna rummaged around inside the basket for Yoh’s history textbook and checked the index. Soon enough, she found the relevant passage, buried deep within:  _ In response to growing anti-Christian sentiment and the perceived undermining of traditional Japanese values by outside cultural influences, the shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, issued a series of edicts in the 1630s. The most comprehensive of these, known today as the Sakoku Edict of 1635, placed severe restrictions upon travel both into and out of Japan, effectively barring foreigners from entry ... _

"I don't believe it … Yoh…"

She picked up his notebook and cast it aside, then laid her hands upon his knees. "So you do pay attention sometimes …"

"Anna," he said, groping for the right words, "this … It means so much to me that you're willing to help an idiot like me pass the tenth grade."

"Yoh," she responded, inching closer to him, "it's the least I can do. And I'm doing it," she continued, her hands gliding up his thighs to cling upon the sides of his torso, "for the same reason you do everything that you've done for me so far."

He hesitated for a minute, but gave a nervous grin and spoke. "I think I like this warm Anna a lot more than the cold, er,  _ endothermic _ one."

Yoh could feel her breath upon his cheek as she replied. "Here's a spontaneous exothermic reaction for you."

This last outburst left Yoh feeling as confused as the quadratic equation had left him, but he quickly realized what she had meant as she grazed his jaw with cuddling fingers, guiding his lips to find hers. His legs uncoiled, and he felt all of her weight bearing down on his back; he submitted, feeling the coarseness of the mat upon his back as Anna lay down on top of him. Blond hairs wove themselves with black as their faces remained together, Yoh feeling the ridge on the roof of Anna's mouth, Anna tickling the underside of his tongue with hers. He felt the contours of her body upon his, felt a tenderness that transcended their clothing, and finally their lips parted, and they lay upon the mat beside each other, textbooks and  _ bento _ containers surrounding them, peeking out at them from behind overgrown grass.

Yoh ran his fingers through Anna's windswept hair, her eyes reflecting his, thankful and wonderfully happy for having each other. "Anna …"

"Hmm?"

"You know what I am right now?"

"Happy? In love?"

"Yea, that too … but I'm your derivative, because I'm lying tangent to your curves!"

"Oh God, Yoh, that was so lame … you're lucky that I love you."

"I love you too. Hey, how about, we share a certain  _ chemistry _ ?"

"Yoh … I swear …"

"Okay, okay …"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've been enjoying reading these stories, please consider leaving a review. Even if it's just a few words ("I liked it" / "Meh"), it's fine! Thanks, and have a lovely day.


	10. A Sticky Situation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh experiences the infamous "talk" that every adolescent boy seems to get. But since he's so distant from any of his other guardians, Anna has to be the one to explain everything! An uncomfortable position for both of them, to say the least. What happens next?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/20/07. Revised 1/11/21.
> 
> Rating: T for innuendo, coarse language, and clinical anatomic and biological references.

A Sticky Situation

_ Kiss #10 _

Though Yoh was still certainly asleep, given how tightly his eyelids were shut and how gentle snores were escaping from his closed mouth, a casual observer might have assumed otherwise. Fortunately for him, neither Amidamaru nor Anna -- although she was in a way observing his body in his dream -- was present at the moment. It would have been quite a spectacle had she witnessed Yoh, rolling onto his side, then onto his back again, his hips gyrating, his snores replaced by quiet grunts, his eyelids closing even tighter, his mouth opening slightly. She probably would have left the room from embarrassment by then, but at that moment Yoh began calling out to her, the sheets rising and falling more rapidly now, until several powerful contractions squeezed at his heartstrings and wrenched him awake, gasping and sweating …

The harsh morning glare coming through his bedroom window quickly shook him to full alertness. He blinked and felt the sheets clinging to him like a shroud.  _ Why am I breathing so hard? And why did I sweat so much? I wasn't having a nightmare, and it's warm this morning, but not too bad. Wait, why is this sweat so warm and gooey?  _ He slid his index finger upon his sheets, feeling the whitish, viscous, hot substance upon his skin, and shuddered.  _ What  _ is  _ this?! Maybe I've got some kind of flesh-eating virus, I heard about those on the news the other day. Could this be … maybe the virus is eating up my brains and they're leaking out of my skin somehow … _

Yoh's door slid open briskly, and his fiancée glided into his room in three short strides. Standing before Yoh's recumbent form with her arms akimbo, she stared down into his clammy face. "What's the holdup? Breakfast won't cook itself, you know."

In a few short seconds Yoh had convinced himself that flesh-eating bacteria had somehow taken up residence in his skull, causing a sticky brain-goo to leak out of his orifices. "Anna! Thank God! I think I'm … going to die!"

She appeared unfazed by his panicked expression, her indigo top barely moving as she gave a dry laugh. "Very perceptive, Yoh. In fact you  _ might  _ die, if you're not frying eggs in the next five minutes."

"No, seriously!" Yoh pleaded, sitting upright. The sheets continued to cling to his chest. "I think … it looks like a flesh-eating virus is in me and …"

"Yoh, if this is another one of your ploys to wriggle your way out of chores, I ain't buying it." Her slender arms moved from their position on her hips, and crossed upon her chest.

"But Anna … What is this then?" He cast off the sheets, unveiling himself. He was now sitting on the side of his bed with just a pair of boxers for privacy. Anna gave a scandalized gasp and jumped back a step, but Yoh continued, "It looks like liquefied brains, don't you think?"

He felt rather foolish sitting there nearly nude, but he was even more embarrassed when he realized that most of the "liquefied brains" had ended up clinging to his undergarment, giving the appearance that he had wet the bed…or…

"EWWWW!" Anna screeched in horror, recoiling all the way to the far wall of Yoh's room and nearly tearing his Soul Bob poster in her haste. "Yoh, that is disgusting! Why in God's name would you think I'd want to see  _ that _ ?!"

"No … Anna, it's not what you think!” Yoh cut in hurriedly. “It's not pee, I haven't wet the bed in almost ten years --"

"I KNOW IT'S NOT! IT'S TEN TIMES WORSE!" she shrieked, hopping mad with revulsion, her aggravated coiffure wildly flailing like a nest of blonde snakes. "What I  _ don't _ know is, why in your right mind would you want to show me that?" She glared at Yoh, but he noticed she interrupted her icy stare by glancing downwards occasionally. "I mean," she continued, slightly softer, "there is a lot of it, maybe you were trying to impress -- But it's really gross! Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?!"

Yoh hesitated for a moment, and then replied, "I was hoping you would know what's wrong with me, actually."

She cocked her head to one side and asked, in a voice as shocked and subdued as it was glacial, "Was that supposed to be -- Are you coming on to me?"

"What?” Confusion was beginning to replace his panic. “Anna, I'm really scared, and you're acting like I did something horrible," he responded. "I'm sorry, whatever it is I did to upset you. So I'm guessing this stuff isn't actually my brains, then?"

Anna raised an eyebrow, changing the quality of her stare from icy to disbelieving. "Wait a minute. This is another of your jokes, right? You know what it is, you have to …"

"Well," he ventured, wrinkling his nose, "it feels kind of like boogers, but the smell is way different --"

"Oh my God … Wait, you had … that class last year! I remember learning all of it!"

"Right, maybe I did," he replied, feeling himself wither slightly at her indignant tone, "but, well, Anna, you know me, I was probably taking a nap when they taught that stuff." He tried to look apologetic, but she just rolled her eyes.

"Ugh, yeah, probably.” She weighed her options for how to proceed. “Look, why don't you just ask one of your friends at school? I'm sure they'll relate to what you just experienced, with all kinds of vulgar slang and X-rated descriptions. You'll like it."

Yoh looked down suddenly, as though her words had socked him square in the gut. "I would, but, well … I hardly talk to anyone at school, and you're my best friend anyway --"

It was difficult to tell who looked more shocked; Yoh stared at the wall behind Anna, bug-eyed, and he was reeling from his slip-up so hard that he ignored the strange, bleach-like smell that came from the hand he had slapped over his shocked mouth. She, on the other hand, merely froze with her hand halfway to her forehead, her usually narrowed eyes wide open. Luckily for her, he was stumbling over his own feet trying to apologize, and missed the sign that she had found his words touching …

"It … it's all right, Yoh," Anna said, waving off his awkward apologies while inwardly forcing herself to stay calm.  _ His best friend … I suppose I feel that way, too. I guess I know what I have to do. _ She massaged the sides of her nose bridge with a firm thumb and forefinger and exhaled sharply. "I guess,” she said at last, “it's time for me to give you the talk your parents never did." When Yoh did not reply, but simply remained still, looking expectantly at her, she continued, "Let’s see, uhm, er, well …This is harder than I thought."

"Just start from the beginning, please, Anna. I want to know what this is. I mean, I know it can't be my brains anymore, but I'm really curious …"

She gave another sigh. "From the beginning … oh man, this is awkward …" She fingered her dark blue top, gliding her pinky over damp circles where beads of sweat had dripped.  _ Yoh is so innocent and pure. Why do I have to be the one who changes that, and why do I feel so guilty about it? Is it because maybe I want to be … more than his best friend? _

"Well?" asked Yoh's antsy voice, jerking Anna back out of her thoughts. She gave a little startled jump.

She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, as though about to meditate, but spoke, in a tone of voice that by Anna's standards almost sounded singsong. "Okay, Yoh … you see, the teenage years are when boys and girls become men and women. A number of changes happen. Both boys and girls start growing, err …" Despite her usual stoic attitude, Anna couldn't help but hesitate now. "They both grow, um, hair in certain places."

Yoh gave a little nod to show he understood; he may be slow sometimes, but not  _ that _ slow.

"In boys, the voice becomes deeper, and he gets a lot taller, and his body starts to fill out." Perhaps subconsciously, Yoh shifted his gaze from her to his own body, saw the slight creasing of his abdominal muscles, the modest but respectable sinews in his arm … and now Anna couldn't help herself from looking at Yoh's form, covered only by a balled-up, sticky sheet in his lap, but he didn't notice her staring, he was still checking himself out …

He looked up again, and Anna gave a high-pitched gasp, turned her face away in overreaction, and tried to pass her behavior off as a sneeze, although it didn't explain why she appeared to be blushing …

"Bless you," Yoh said in response to her alleged sneeze.

A sigh of relief passed through her lips, and she continued, "Erm, where was I? Oh … In girls, there is some height increase, a widening of the hips, and the body fills out in the, uh …" She flinched, racking her brain for the right anatomical term to use. "The mammary glands."

Anna couldn't help but notice Yoh's eyes shifting quickly to her chest, almost feeling his roving eyes devouring her gentle curves as he continued to sneak rapid glances that couldn't be more obvious. She hadn't expected him to know what “mammary glands” were, but maybe it was just a coincidence. He risked a peek at her face, and their eyes met; his were both excited and guilty, and he had expected hers to be angry, violated, reproving, but instead they looked slightly uncomfortable and surprised, perhaps … pleasantly so …

Their eyes remained locked for several seconds before Anna shook her head, much more violently than she had meant to. "Ahem … anyway, moving right along. As you continue toward adulthood, your body will begin making hormones. They cause certain … physical changes and can cause you to have … certain urges …"

Before she could think of a sufficiently delicate way to phrase the next part of her speech, Yoh smoothed out part of the bed sheet and pointed at one of the moist streaks on it. "This is all very interesting, Anna. Thanks for explaining so well. But what does all of that have to do," and he pointed again, "with  _ this _ ?"

"Well … God, how do I put this …" she wondered aloud. "Ah! Well, see, the hormones I was talking about earlier, the ones that give you certain urges? They also cause your … generative organs to become capable of reproduction."

As his reply, Yoh favored her with a completely baffled stare. "Anna. You're smart. I'm not. Could you put that in a way that I'd understand?"

It was her turn to stare blankly; she had no idea how to rephrase what she had just said without jeopardizing the story's "T" rating. "Uh … see, part of becoming a man, is the ability to … reproduce …"

"But that doesn't make any sense!" Yoh declared. "I did that once when I was really young!"

Anna looked appalled. "What?!"

"Yeah! And they turned out okay. A little off-center and blurry, but I still did it!"

Half of Anna laughed; the other half took in just how naïve Yoh really was. "No, not reproduction with a copy machine. I meant the ability to make … to have children."

"Oh!" Yoh's thin eyebrows shot up. "I know about that! The guys at school always talk about that at lunch. Except they never called it reproducing, I think they say 'fu--'"

"There are plenty of slang terms for it," Anna interrupted loudly. "But the proper term is 'intercourse.'"

"Okay, whatever, with your fancy words. So what's  _ that _ have to do with … you know …"

The crumpled sheets in Yoh's lap reminded her that she still had quite a task to accomplish. "Ugh. Don't tell anybody that I was the one to explain all of this to you, okay?" After he nodded, she took another deep breath and pressed on. "When a man gets excited, you see, it can cause a stiff -- well, I guess the clinical term would be 'tumescence.'"

"Never heard of it -- wait, when a guy gets excited? And cause a stiff …" He looked as though deep in thought for a moment, then his shoulders rose slightly and his face brightened. "Oh! It makes sense!"

"Huh?" Anna looked perplexed; it wasn't like Yoh to have such strokes of brilliance without death urgently knocking on his door.

"Yeah! That time we went to the beach last week. I was wading in the water and you were about to come in. You let your hair loose, and you were running towards me in your bikini, and then I saw your face in the sunlight … You're very pretty, Anna, you know, and I guess it did make me excited in a way. I got goosebumps and I felt my skin tingle … but anyway, I thought a jellyfish stung me or something because I was swelling up, but now I know! It was tumescence!"

Anna appeared both disturbed and flattered, and it seemed like she wanted to say something, but she bit her lip, trying her best to pretend she wasn't a little excited by Yoh's naïve confession. She forced herself to look away from him and continue. "Anyway, if a man with tumescence continues to uh, be excited, then it will eventually … release a fluid that can cause a woman to become pregnant."

Eventually, after several blank moments, a dawning look of comprehension began to appear on Yoh's face. He looked at the bed sheet, blinked, looked at Anna, blinked again, and suddenly gasped. "But … Anna! No! You need to get out of here, now! What if you accidentally touched it? We're not ready to have children! We're not married yet, and besides, we're only --"

To both his and her shock, Anna placed her hand upon his quivering arm. "Don't worry, Yoh. It doesn't matter if I touch it. Women can only be made pregnant by it if …" She drew slightly closer, and Yoh felt a swelling in his chest as he felt her hot breath wafting upon his ear; she was whispering something…

"What?!" he exclaimed, drawing back from her shocked. "So that's what people have … that … for. But then why do all the guys at school want to do that so bad? They're just kids like me, they're not ready to have families of their own yet …"

In response, Anna drew herself nearer to Yoh once more and began whispering once again. "Because it feels …" and the rest of her words were nearly inaudible, and drowned out by his gasp.

Beet-red and bug-eyed, Yoh looked as though he had just stepped off a particularly harrowing roller coaster. "I can't believe it! Every guy in my class is disgusting." He made a face; since he was still flush with embarrassment, it was quite a spectacle. "Wait a minute … why was I able to release … this stuff? I was sleeping! I certainly wasn't doing — I mean I kind of was dreaming about — err, never mind …"

Once more, Anna felt her heart flutter a bit at Yoh's candid confession. Perhaps it had even made her fantasize a bit -- but she shook her head violently, as if trying to exorcise her impure thoughts, and cleared her throat diplomatically. "Well, as I said earlier, any kind of stimulation will result in a … release of fluid. It doesn't have to be from another person. When you cause it to yourself, and there's nothing wrong with it either, it's called —"

Yoh interrupted, looking triumphant. "I know! It's called jack—"

"It has," Anna cut in before he could finish, "a lot of nicknames."

"Oh, my God," he started. "That's what those guys were doing in the locker room! I thought maybe they were making sure they were clean over there."

She smirked. "Maybe the guys in your class really are disgusting."

"I told you!"

"Anyway," she said with a chuckle, "it looks like I finally got to the part you've been waiting for. If a guy doesn't get to release his fluid from intercourse or from … what you just described, then it starts to build up and it has to go somewhere. So, sometimes when a guy is sleeping, he will have an exciting dream or rub against the mattress and have a nocturnal emission."

"A what?"

Anna pointed to the wadded bed sheet in his lap. "A that."

"Oh!" He sat up and nodded. "Is there anything bad about it, though? Like do I have to go to the doctor?"

"It's all part of growing up. In fact, it's good. It means you're waiting. After all, you shouldn't have intercourse until you fall in love. You have to find the right person."

"Who's the right person?"

"When you meet her," she said, and Yoh heard the unusual note of kindness in her voice, "you'll know."

He felt color rising into his cheeks as he thought of the dream he'd had last night, and maybe it was his imagination, but as his memories grew more vivid, it seemed that the little smile on Anna's face grew as well. Could she see, somehow, into his mind, where he was recalling her delicate arms, her slender torso, the mop of blonde that lapped at her neck and shoulders? Or, too, the way his eyes had locked with hers, her face beautiful with a sultry, almost supercilious expression that kept him enthralled ...

Yoh skipped ahead slightly in his recollections, and even from the mere recalling of something as immaterial as a dream, he felt his heart pumping faster, just as it had when he had been sleeping not one hour ago. Anna looked at him then, mouth opened slightly, her eyes narrowed just a bit, but not with irritation, and he let her goldenrod strands of hair cascade upon his gently brushing fingertips, coyly inching his free hand towards her waist, the other moving back slightly and sliding up from the nape of her neck —

Sometime around then, the line between Yoh's dream and reality blurred and, as Anna gave a little gasp of pleasant surprise, disappeared entirely. The fine hairs on his upper lip tickled hers just before they grazed, and he could taste the salty traces of dried excitement there. She could feel his still-sticky hands nestled upon her back, and a little shudder of adrenaline surged through her body as the warmth of his bare chest enveloped her. The bed sheet was suspended now only by her hips and legs pressing against his, and Yoh gave a soft sigh of pleasure that Anna swallowed up as she slid her tender hands upon his back, feeling his taut shoulder blades, his spine that vibrated with nerves and excitement. It was her turn to sigh; Yoh pressed his body to hers tightly, closing his arms around her back, and she could feel his heartbeat upon her chest, and the suppleness of his tongue as it chased hers to and fro…

They stood in each other's arms for quite some time, her ebullient face craned up at Yoh's, and somehow she knew the lazy, almost childish smile he wore meant more than anything he could have said at the moment. In fact, it was she who eventually broke the silence first.

"That was very bold of you, Yoh."

He smiled even more broadly as he took in her affectionate, soft tone. "People do crazy things when they're in love. It's like you said, Anna. 'When you meet her, you'll know.' You are the girl of my dreams. Literally."

"Aww … I love —" But before she could finish her reply, Yoh abruptly sat down, crumpling the bedsheet tightly in his lap. "What's wrong?" she asked, but she saw his embarrassed expression and the balled-up sheet in his lap and did the math.

"I’ve been doing all the lecturing so far today, but there are some things that I don’t know," she said sultrily, her eyes lingering upon the bedsheet as if trying to see through it. “Maybe, for a change, you can teach me. Or we can learn together …”

The last thing she did before closing the door behind her was reach for the bedsheet. Yoh saw the determination on her face and made no effort to stop her … 


	11. Everyday Miracle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh's hapless rhetorical skills get a kick in the pants (figuratively) from Manta and (almost literally) from Anna. But does the help actually improve his writing?
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/22/07. Revised 1/14/21.
> 
> Rating: T for coarse language and romantic themes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was, according to my original notes, written in a few hours. And it shows. I did my best to punch it up, but you know what they say about polishing turds. Nonetheless, I include it here to preserve the collection in its entirety.

Everyday Miracle

_Kiss #11_

_“And you handed me this pad and this pen with which to write / While it’s fresh in your mind / Before it gets away …”_

_-Dashboard Confessional,_ “Write It Out”

" _I love to take naps. If I was in charge, I would_ —"

"You mean, 'were.'"

"What?" Yoh looked up from the paper in his hands and saw Anna, a fist perched on the waist of her black skirt, looking impatient and deadly.

"You're speaking in the subjunctive mood, which normally calls for the bare infinitive, but forms of ‘be’ are an exception, so you say ‘were,’ not ‘was’.”

"'Subjunctive'? ‘Infinitive’? Anna, what are you talking about?"

The sheet of paper parted Yoh’s company and found itself between Anna's white fingertips. She picked up a red pen from the table and crossed out his 'was', adding to the network of crimson lines that crosshatched his manuscript. "Honestly, this is embarrassing. You spend so much of your time hanging out with Manta, and he's the smartest kid I know. Why doesn't any of it ever rub off on you?"

He sighed and looked down at the floor, seeing Anna's feet tapping out an annoyed rhythm from the corner of his eye. "I … I asked him to help me write this, actually, but he's late …"

A derisive laugh prefaced her response. "Help you write that, my ass. More like you're going to piss away the afternoon miniature golfing and spitting off highway overpasses." She saw Yoh's affronted expression and relented slightly, but not by much. "Well, whatever. You're taking away from my TV time. Just remember that if you don't get a decent paper written, you will fail. And failure is not an option under this roof."

From behind Yoh, several sharp raps echoed down the hall. "That must be him, finally."

"Come in," Anna called, in a tone that completely contradicted the nature of her offer. A jarring creak resonated in the hallway, followed by a subdued slam and footsteps. "Manta," she continued in a tone no less glacial, "this know-nothing is all yours. Prove me wrong and teach him something."

Manta quaked upon his small feet and gave a deep bow, although Anna had already left the room. "I'll do my best, Anna-san." He climbed into the now vacant chair before Yoh and placed a thick tome upon the table. The taller boy made sure he could hear the television from the other room before he spoke.

"'Anna- _san_ '? She's not _your_ slave driver," he joked with a smirk.

"I know, but … Your fiancée, she scares me sometimes, in all honesty."

"You're not the only one. If I don't get a good paper done soon, I swear she's gonna slip cyanide into my toothpaste."

His diminutive friend chuckled at that. "You've already got something written? That's good."

"Well," he replied, pushing the heavily revised draft across the table, "it's something. But it's no good."

Manta scanned the paper quickly, taking in each line rapidly, every now and then giving a noncommittal grunt or wobble of the head. "So, the 'everyday miracles' you're writing about are sleep and naps?"

He was answered by a gaping yawn. "Yep," and he stretched his arms behind his pointy hairdo, "they really are, you know. I feel so refreshed after a good night's sleep, and without naps, I'd die of boredom at school."

Stubby fingers pried open the gargantuan book on the table and flipped through its pages quickly. "I'm not going to argue that point. I like to nap as much as the next guy. Hell, I could use a good nap, seeing as how my dad's making me take extra cram school. It sucks like a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner." He continued as Yoh laughed, "But…I think there's really only so much you can say about sleeping and naps. After all, when you're asleep, your brain more or less shuts down. I think you'd be better off writing about something you can describe in more detail, something profound, poetic …" Suddenly his frenetic flipping stopped, and the pages came to rest. "This, for example."

The page displayed a deep red, vaguely ovoid, lobed blob, textured in places with blue lines and pink ridges, and adorned with four tubular appendages roughly at right angles to each other.

"Is this … a heart?"

Manta smiled. "It's an everyday miracle." His finger trailed down the page now, and he was reading aloud interesting factoids as he found them: "At rest, the average heart beats 72 times per minute, or just about 2.7 billion times in the average lifetime. Those heartbeats will pump about 9 million liters of blood through your veins every year! Think of it, it never stops beating, not even when the rest of you takes a nap."

Yoh was still fixated upon the picture on the opposite page, but he nodded slowly. "That's pretty cool, actually. Without it, none of the other organs would get any oxygen. Plus, like you said, it's always going, no matter what!"

"The ancient Greeks thought the heart was the body's control center, even though we know today that it's the brain that's in charge. But people still consider the heart to be the foundation of emotions — especially love."

"Yeah! Like the way it beats faster when you get excited? I see why the Greeks might have thought that …" Yoh picked up his draft, flipped it over, and began to jot some ideas down. "Hmm … 'Center of emotions,' 'Never stops beating,' 'Beats faster when excited' … This is good stuff! Thanks, Manta!"

"Always a pleasure to help." He hopped off his chair and began pushing it in, but Yoh stopped him.

"Whoa, whoa! Going somewhere already?"

Manta made a face. "My dad wants me to come home right after cram school. I think you met him before?"

"Oh …" Yoh recalled that the one time he and Manta's father had been in the same room, he had to restrain an urge to stagger off his gurney and strangle the little autocratic son of a —

"Yeah … Sorry, Yoh. I'll see you at school tomorrow. Good luck with finishing the paper!"

Yoh returned his wave and sat down. Despite the fact that he was sitting before a blank sheet once again, this time he felt energized. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling his own heart thumping, letting it inspire him, and then put his pencil to the paper. _The heart in each of our chests is an Everyday Miracle because …_

" _… over nine million liters of fresh blood to your vital organs every year!_ "

Anna crossed one of her legs over and stretched slightly, stifling a yawn.

"Sorry, Anna. I'm not much of a writer."

She shrugged. "I didn't mean anything by the yawn. I'm just a bit tired, is all."

Lines of eagerness appeared on Yoh's expression. "So, what do you think so far?"

"Eh. It's not Dickens, but it's not bad either. Continue, if you don't mind."

He swallowed and continued. "Ahem. _When we get tired from our everyday routine, we get headaches, our eyelids sag, our backs hurt, but the heart keeps on chugging! Even as we dream, even when our brains are too exhausted to think clearly, our hearts continue to beat. Its —_ oops, hang on …" Yoh added an apostrophe to the draft. " _It's truly a miracle._ "

"I still think you could have picked something a little less gross. What about sunrises, plants, electricity?" She smirked. "Or even the miracle of you writing a half-decent paper."

One of the pages in Yoh's hands drifted to the floor in his shock. Even backhanded comments from Anna were rare, and he knelt to retrieve the page, trying to hide his blushing.

"Now, don't get big-headed. It's all right so far, but let’s see if you tie everything up with a good ending."

Anna motioned for him to continue. With a hint of hesitation, he ruffled the papers and read aloud in an unconfident voice, " _When the rest of the body is exerted physically, it wears out. The lungs heave in exhaustion, the legs twitch with fatigue, the entire body drips with sweat. Years of daily special training runs with weights strapped to my arms and legs have taught me that —_ "

"Very subtle, Yoh." Her words were sardonic and her tone icy, but Anna looked almost entertained by his editorial aside. "But I think you're going to have to cut that part out."

The abrading noise of graphite on paper filled the room as he trimmed the relevant line from his narrative. "Where was I? … _drips with sweat. The body wants to stop. It wants to sit down and have a drink of water, or maybe take a short nap. But the heart, unlike the rest of the body, wants to work_ harder _! It pounds more and more …_ How do I spell 'furiously'?"

"Huh?" Anna's mouth was open slightly, and she looked a bit dazed, staring at the wrinkled sheets in Yoh's hands with intense eyes. "Oh … don't worry about it. I'll check your spelling later. Keep reading."

"If … if you say so. Are you okay, Anna?"

She gave an uneven nod. "Yeah. Fine. Don’t stop."

"Alright … _It pounds more and more furiously. It goes faster the more the body wants to slow down! It's like a drumbeat keeping time for the rest of the band, the metronome_ " — Anna gave a slight gasp at his vocabulary, but he had already continued on — " _of the human body's symphony. But physical activity isn't the only thing that can increase heart rate. The ancient Greeks believed the heart to be an everyday miracle too: They believed the heart functioned as the center of all thought, because of the way it quickened, seemingly in response to excitement, to fear, to all emotions, really. Today we know the brain really is the organ in charge. Nonetheless, the heart —_ "

"Yoh." Anna uncrossed her legs and clasped both her hands around one of her knees. "Did Manta write this for you, or something?"

"Well … he did give me the idea to write about the heart. And a thesaurus may or may not have been involved. But everything aside from the fancy words is my work."

"No … you don't have it in you … or at least I've never seen you write anything nearly as slick before …" Maybe it was the way the orange afternoon sunlight played on her face, but she looked a little pink as she said, a little softer than usual, "I … have to admit I'm a bit impressed, Yoh. Writing about the heart must've really inspired you or something."

"Maybe," he ventured weakly, but Anna motioned for him to go on. "Um, let's see … _Nonetheless, the heart remains the seat of all emotion to this day. Devastation makes our chests feel heavy and helpless. Excitement causes our pulse to flutter, fear sends blood thumping into our temples, and then there is love_ —"

The abruptness with which Yoh had stopped reading aloud did not go unnoticed. Nor did his sudden move to hide the papers behind his back. Anna squinted at him suspiciously, leaning forward aggressively, the azure beads around her neck rattling with her distrust. "Yoh, is your essay incomplete?!"

Her accusation froze in midair above his head, crystallizing and pelting him with flecks of snow; he gave an involuntary shudder. "No, I … I just think I can cut this last part out here. I ramble a little. No sense in reading it to you if it sucks, right?"

"Bullshit," she said, simply and icily. "What I’ve heard so far is probably the best damn thing you've ever written in your life. You're hiding something from me. Now out with it."

Yoh's resolve sagged along with his shoulders; he knew there was no denying Anna's request. Every tendon in his tensed arms resisted him as he withdrew the papers from behind his back, smoothed out the creases deliberately, and sighed in resignation. " _And then there is love, the most powerful emotion of all. Love is a multifaceted thing,_ " he read, his voice shaky and tentative, " _an Everyday Miracle in itself, and one that is unique to each couple who experiences it. There is a hand, blotched red with fury, that strikes fear into my heart when it rears up for a slap. There is a slender back, draped in a lovely black dress, that makes my heart stop beating every time it walks away from me in disappointment. And there is a face, with angry black slits for eyes, furrows of frustration upon its brow, and deadly thin lips opened wide to deliver a scolding, and as I take it all in, I feel my chest burning with gloom and self-pity._ "

Yoh took a few deep breaths then, seeing Anna's unmoving, stoic figure above the top margin of the draft he was holding with unsteady hands. " _But it is during those rare moments when I take that hand within mine, when that back turns around and greets me warmly, when that face relaxes, those eyes open wide with delight and gaze into mine, that brow smooths out to match those flawless cheeks, those lips smile sweetly — that is when my heart beats strongest and I am left utterly breathless. That hand, that back, that face, all belong to my fiancée Anna, and so does my heart. She is truly my Everyday Miracle._ "

Yoh lowered his head in shame at what he had just read, feeling distinctly hot behind the ears. In one fluid motion Anna leapt off her seat, relieved Yoh of the draft and placed it on the table, and clasped both her hands behind his neck.

"I told you it was awful!” he said upon feeling Anna’s hands descend upon him. “Don't strangle me, Anna, I'll just edit it out like I said …"

Then he realized that no choking was imminent, and he looked, bewildered, at her, but she simply said:

"You'll have to edit it, but only because you didn't write in this part."

Anna's slender lips planted themselves upon his, and she could smell his brand of body wash wafting up from his neck. She felt his pulse against her chest and her fingertips upon his neck, beating faster now, and as she slid her tongue between his teeth an indescribable heat diffused through his back, and she felt it against her arms, felt it as surely as she could feel his spiky hair grazing her face, and then an identical rush surged through her chest. Yoh tightened his arms around Anna's midriff and felt her peachy, tingling skin, felt little ripples of adrenaline shoot through his fingertips where they glided across her back, and she pulled back slightly with a satisfying _smack_.

"Well, it's too bad you can't take this approach with all your classes."

Yoh laughed in Anna's arms, and they held each other close for a long while, basking in the everyday miracle that is all too often taken for granted …


	12. Venus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna doesn't just watch soap operas for the entertainment value. What does she do at home while Yoh battles, anyway? Take a shocking glimpse into Anna's mind in this first part of a three-story series…
> 
> Originally published on Fanfiction.net on 8/24/07. Revised 1/15/21.
> 
> Rating: T for mild language, suggestive themes and good old-fashioned angst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My effort to make a story that can stand on its own, yet is part of a larger arc (chapters 13 and 14).
> 
> Written from Anna's perspective -- the first time I've ever attempted using first-person with a female character. Hope it's not too offensive.

Venus

_ Kiss #12 _

_ "I won't say a word…Silent but strong, yeah, I'm playing that card, and you're noticing nothing again…" _

_ -Taking Back Sunday,  _ "This Photograph is Proof"

Blame it on whatever you will, but I've never had very many friends. I like to delude myself, sometimes, that a lack of social prowess comes part and parcel with being a shaman, but I see my fiancé going on daily jaunts with Manta, Horohoro, Ren and Ryu, and every time I hear his innocent laugh I feel another bit of me die inside.

The isolation gets old fast, believe it or not. In my defense, I never was given much of a chance. Between being orphaned, fending off a demon that possessed me for years, and training, I never had much time to sharpen my social skills. Not that the lack thereof made much difference; after all, would  _ you _ care to associate much with some weird girl who for all you knew would sprout horns and spit fire at every bystander in a fifty-foot radius, no matter how socially adept she was? If I sound a little resentful, then you don't know the half of it.

On the other hand, a lack of a social life has its moments — it affords me lots of time to think. My thoughts mostly occur before the television, another perk of my solitude. It is there, sitting upon a rickety wooden chair and watching hour-long melodramas unfold in that campy style peculiar to soap operas, that I can swap my worries for fictional ones.

Anxiety arises naturally as a result of thinking. In my case, given the hours on end I'm afforded to think, the troubles swarm in the hive of my brain, and oftentimes I find myself unable to sleep, the buzz of anxiety echoing in my head and almost making my pillow vibrate. I worry the money will run out and even our meager existence as we know it will cease. I fret over the possibility that Hao, precious little that I know about him, will one day find his way to my bedroom. I'm concerned with the unknowns that abound in my knowledge of Hao.

But most of all, I worry about Yoh.

You could say that in our relationship, Yoh definitely got the short end of the stick. He's the one who cooks, cleans, conditions himself and walks on eggshells whenever I'm around. He's the one who's liable to get chewed out, even when we both know damn well who's at fault. Yoh, lest we forget, is in jeopardy so long as he remains a contender for the title of Shaman King. Just about every wannabe who's ever so much as cracked a joke to a ghost from Kyoto to Konigsberg wants to take Yoh down a peg.

I say "lest  _ we _ forget," but maybe “lest  _ you _ forget” is more appropriate.

I could never forget.

You wouldn't be able to forget either if the man you loved came back from a weekend excursion tattooed with virulent bruises and smears of blood. You  _ definitely _ wouldn't forget if it was the same story week after week. And my recurring visions of him unmoving in a ditch somewhere, with shattered limbs horribly bent back on themselves … People often say Yoh puts his ass on the line every day while I just mind the store back home. I won't deny that, but if you think it's easy having a solid sixteen hours a day to ponder whether or not the one you love will make it home alive, day in and day out, think again.

Yes, I love Yoh. Surprising, perhaps. But if soap operas have taught me anything, it's that losing someone you've become attached to will devastate you. I love Yoh, but in a platonic, almost sisterly sense. Any more deeply and my anxieties would choke me in my sleep.

I love him, but I could go on without him.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

A good indicator of my anxiety, of my denial, is the extent to which I find sitting still unbearable. That would explain my aimless meandering through the deserted halls and rooms of the En Inn. I straighten a rug here and realign a painting there, my fingers shaking, trying not to think about how much the painting of a tree in autumn, foregrounded against the rich orange of late afternoon, looks a bit like a young man wearing tangerine headphones, copiously dripping blood onto the canvas …

Come to think of it, everything reminds me a little of Yoh, actually. That's a bad thing when you're already one step from a nervous breakdown. "Relax," I tell myself shakily, "Yoh just left to buy some groceries. So he's been gone three hours. Maybe he ran into Manta on the way or something. It's just the supermarket; what could go wrong?"

Even to my disconsolate ears, the confidence in my voice sounds strained and artificial. I know full well that the danger Yoh faces doesn't diminish even when he's sleeping in the room next to mine; compared to that, the supermarket is like a convention of Death Row inmates across the street from a gun factory.

Why am I so anxious? I shuffle like a zombie to the refrigerator, my mind racing against my will, and the cold air wafts against the hem of my skirt, ethereally chilling, like prying open an unearthed coffin. My clammy fingers close around the top of a Coke bottle and twist off its cap absentmindedly. I raise the bottle to my lips, willing myself to believe it's an elixir, a philter sure to ward off my fears.

It's refreshingly cool and almost sickly sweet, but it's no magic potion. Sooner than the mouthful of cola is down my gullet, the doubts resurface. I sigh and pull out a chair for myself at the kitchen table, resigned to listening to my inner voice.

Just outside the window, the sunset begins in earnest. The Zen rock garden is magnificent in its golden splendor, its smooth stones fiery red in the dusk, like a bed of hot coals. The cirrus clouds near the horizon form puffy pink lines against a prismatic background that darkens from delicate azure to deep maroon. All in all, it's a magnificent view, but the sight of those clouds crisscrossing upon a color that's all too much like bruised flesh spoils it somewhat. My memory flashes back several weeks until I pinpoint why the sunset is so upsetting …

One of Yoh's adorable habits is the tuneless, atrociously off-key singing he always performs in the shower. When I don't hear him killing the chorus of a Soul Bob song at the top of his lungs, then I know the coast is clear for me to soak in the bathtub for a bit. One day about three weeks ago, the house had been oddly silent; I think I had forgotten that Yoh was even home. I walked into the bathroom oblivious, with a robe tucked under one arm and a newspaper under the other, completely unaware of the cloaked figure behind the shower curtain.

I'm not sure why I hadn't just left the room once I saw the specter of his body toweling off behind the curtain, but in any case, before I could leave, the shower curtain whipped to one side, revealing a dripping Yoh completely in the nude. I think we both screamed; he scrambled like mad and made to cover his waist with a towel, but I remained rooted to the spot, unable to shake free what I had just seen … and not for the obvious reason, either.

There's no denying that Yoh's rigorous training for the Shaman Fight has left him in very nice physical condition; I have to confess part of me couldn't stop staring because, as he gaped at me with horrified, wide eyes, with his matted black hair trellising down to his collarbone and dripping beads of water onto his chest, Yoh was  _ very  _ cute. But that aspect of Yoh's physical appearance was more or less what I had expected; I had never seen him in the altogether before, but his sleek build was not a surprise.

But I had never spared a thought to what might be lurking beneath those clothes other than taut muscles, and that revelation absolutely stunned me. His biceps and shoulders were tattooed with a network of scars, some light, some deep, some old and completely healed, some still tender and rosy. A truly horrific bruise of the deepest vermillion marred the flesh over his right ribcage, and the opposite side of his chest sported a heroic gash that ran nearly from nipple to belly button. It had been stitched shut, but the laceration had not quite healed yet, and I could see the oozing pink skin where the scab had begun to peel. And at that moment I felt the injuries that Yoh had suffered personally, as though it had been  _ my _ arms butchered by claws and daggers and near-misses,  _ my  _ ribs sundered by a twenty-ton behemoth,  _ my _ chest incised by a ten-foot spear …

And Yoh's ability to maintain his demeanor of innocence, of offhandedness, of naïveté, seemed all the more miraculous once I saw for myself the injuries he had sustained by the tender age of fifteen. He whispered — and I saw a fresh gash on his neck that bulged out with his Adam's apple as he swallowed delicately — "Anna … I'm sorry …" as though  _ he _ had done something wrong, like  _ he _ had walked in on  _ me _ bathing, like  _ he _ had been the one watching TV for hours while I had brushes with death on a daily basis …

I could say absolutely nothing; it felt as though  _ my  _ throat had been assaulted. I wanted to cry out, to support that earnest face against my chest as I did my best to assuage the anguish of his injuries with my touch, but for some reason I remained motionless and speechless. I wanted to tell him  _ I  _ was the sorry one, that I couldn't bear seeing my love so badly battered, much less even begin to contemplate what it might be like with him gone …

More than anything else, I fear that, were I more expressive of my concern, my love, for Yoh, it would simply interfere with his laid-back lifestyle. I know he operates best with a carefree mind, and if he were preoccupied worrying about a loved one, his performance would suffer. Do I want him to know I love him? No.

Maybe …

It does beg the question, doesn't it?

Do I want to know if  _ he _ loves  _ me _ ?

No.

Maybe …

A lifetime of isolation has hardened me prematurely, and I often lose sight of the fact that Yoh's barely old enough to be a high school student. He certainly seems mature enough to be capable of love, but for whom, and on what level? Does he regard me as a close friend, a mentor, or even a personal trainer of sorts? Or … something more?

It's harder than you will ever know for me to be so draconian with Yoh. It's a bit like being the proverbial kid in a candy store while also being allergic to sugar. The way he sometimes acts so  _ strangely _ around me, I find adorable, but to react any more strongly than with an impassive glare would be letting on too much, I think … Somehow the idea that my presence makes him nervous in that manner so particular to teenage love excites me. This morning he kept looking at me out of the corners of his eyes, almost as though there were a surprise in store for me that I would discover any moment.

But there will be no surprises, at least none for Yoh. I have my duty as the future Shaman King's wife to do everything in my power to help him achieve his goal, and love merely complicates things. If I must exercise restraint and torment myself with a love that will remain platonic and unexpressed at best and unrequited at worst, then I will. No one can say I’m not devoted.

I put down my bottle of Coke; I had finished it long ago but had clutched it still, fantasizing that the ridges upon the glass were the scars on Yoh's bicep … I pick up a portrait from the coffee table, handsomely framed in a filigreed gold-plated frame whose beauty and grace were surpassed only by the photograph within its boundaries. I imagine myself materializing on the other side of the glass, feeling the gentle bristle of his pointy hair, but, of course, reality intervenes. I merely gaze longingly into the picture, and the youngest Asakura stares back at me with relaxed, almost lazy eyes, and upon his lips shines a casual grin.

I press the photograph tightly to my chest, feeling the chilly glass warm against my heart. "Please … come home safely, Yoh." My breath obscures the portrait with fog, but I close my eyes and feel my lips press upon the blurry glass, and, before I can feel bashful about the ridiculousness of kissing an inanimate object, the picture returns to the coffee table, signed with lipstick, a token of love that only I and Yoh's picture can ever know about.

It will have to do, for now …

_ Continues in Kiss #13, "Mars" _


	13. Mars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoh takes the spotlight in this second part of the three-shot story arc. So what exactly is taking him so long at the supermarket?
> 
> Originally published on FanFiction.net on 8/25/07. Revised 1/22/21.
> 
> Rating: T for coarse language and violence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 of the three-shot that started in the previous chapter.
> 
> This one's from Yoh's first-person perspective.

Mars

_ Kiss #13 _

I never understood why they make shopping baskets as uncomfortable to hold as possible. Now, while I stare blankly at the hundreds of cartons of eggs laid out in the freezer like some kind of chicken coffin, the bare metal wires for handles dig into the pad of my palm. It's a bit uncomfortable.

In my other hand is Anna's shopping list. Her not-so-tidy handwriting is scrawled all over the scrap of paper. I got it wet somehow, to make matters worse, and the ink started to run. Now, it’s a smeary, nearly illegible mess. I squint at the next unchecked item, which for all I can tell says "Organ Jesus."

I sigh into the coffin-like freezer before me, and my breath becomes visible, swirling around before coming to rest atop a dozen grade-A eggs. I look over my shoulder. Good -- no one’s watching. I open one of the cartons to make sure none of the eggs inside are cracked. I’m not the best student, but one thing I’ve learned is that nothing sets Anna off like bringing home a carton of imperfect eggs.

Now that I mention it, lots of things are likely to set Anna off. I really do try to please her, but for some reason or other it either goes unnoticed or fails to work. I know I'm a few noodles short of a bowl of ramen, but my heart is in the right place.

And so it goes …

I turn my attention to the shopping list again, trying to decipher the next item, but all I can see is “Organ Jesus.”. I frown, I rotate the paper, I play with the letters in my head, until it hits me.

"Orange juice?"

With a flourish of satisfaction, I unclip the pen from my pocket and scribble a check mark next to it. I pass a display of canned soup and cut through the cereal aisle to place a carton of Sixty Second Maid™ orange juice into my shopping basket.

In many ways the carton of juice reminds me of Anna; it's at its best when chilled, it has just enough sweetness to be palatable, and has a way of waking you up.

I think of her all the time, in case you haven't noticed by now. And it's not just because I sting -- sometimes literally -- from the way she's harsh with me sometimes. Corny as it sounds, I can't help but think of her as my inspiration. I can say that I've learned more from a month of her tutoring than I ever will from my formal education. I surprise myself now, remembering vocabulary words that no other teacher could ever have made stick. Fear may not be a widely accepted pedagogical tool (thanks for that one, Anna), but hey, I can't argue with the results. And let's be perfectly honest; if it weren't for the fear she strikes into my heart, I never would've gotten my ass in gear in preparation for the Shaman Fight.

No amount of preparation, however, mental or physical, could improve my chances of getting through Anna's shopping list any faster. I turn my attention to the next item on the list, which appears to be "Corn," followed by what really looks like a swear word.

"Next time, Anna tells me what to get, and I write it down," I promise to myself. "Now, Corn … Freaks? Flocks? Flecks? Oh! Flakes!"

The shopping always unfolds this way, as sort of a game. The list is cryptic, and I search within myself to find the solution. Luckily, I'm used to that: God knows that figuring out Anna's mood is a puzzle far tougher than any crossword I'll ever see. She just stares at you with those slits for eyes, and you feel your insides turning to blocks of ice, organ by organ, and you don't know whether next she'll hug you or throttle you. Granted, with Anna, it’s almost never the hug … 

It's partly because Anna is always so emotionally distant that I feel so nervous around her. I'm much more comfortable dealing with people who express their anger directly. I'm pretty good at dealing with angry people; it's one of the perks of being naturally laid back. It tends to be contagious. But Anna's anger is like a stealth bomber. You see its shadow and you don't quite know what to do. Sometimes it's just passing through, other times it drops its payload on your head, but in either case it continues to fly on, as if nothing’s happening.

Speaking of stealth bombers, and other things clad in black, I think her fashion echoes her personality. She always wears that black dress. And what could be more appropriate for her? One outfit to match one emotional state. And it never changes. Happy occasion? Black dress. Personal tragedy? Black dress. Hell, when the day comes for us to exchange vows, she'll probably put on that black dress, glare at the best man, glare at the priest, glare at me and utter a bone-chilling "I do."

Now that is a topic I don't think about often. It's hard for me to believe I'm engaged. I'm probably the least likely person to get married, and that’s not even considering my age.. Sure, I know how to cook and do laundry, and all that good stuff. But honestly, marriage doesn't seem like it would suit me well. I don't have a fear of commitment, exactly, but I think marriage would cut into my leisure time, and for a slacker like me, leisure time is oxygen. Anna would suffocate me figuratively (she already does literally, after all).

And then there is the most important issue: love.

Does she or doesn't she?

And equally important — do I or don't I?

I mean, I do, I think. But love is something you want to be sure about, isn’t it? As I've said, she's not exactly the most emotive girl I know, and when she does show emotion, it's usually anger, more specifically anger that's directed at me. And every so often I can see something in her — the eyes that soften so slightly, I’m mostly convinced it’s just my imagination; the arms that uncross from her chest; the glare that's replaced by sort of an uncertain grimace. Is it pity, is it me reading too much into meaningless nervous tics, or is it something approaching love?

But I have to admit that her cold reception spurs me on. Sort of like the girl who plays hard to get. Sadly, most of my efforts have gone unnoticed.

I've got an ace up my sleeve, though. For the entire last week I've been using my spare time to put together a little surprise for her. I put it in a nice envelope and slid it under her pillow this morning. Maybe she'll notice it. I hope I wasn’t acting too suspiciously this morning. And I hope none of my classmates blab to her. I wasn’t exactly being sneaky about writing it in my classes …

I notice that I've advanced to the cashier in the check-out line. I recognize her; my classmate Megumi always seems to be on duty when it comes time to go grocery shopping. She gives a little nod as she sees me, beginning to scan bar codes. "How's it going, Yoh?"

I wonder if I look out of sorts from thinking about Anna so much. "Huh? Oh, hey, Megumi, I'm all right, I guess … How are you?"

The price scanner gives a squeal. She frowns and punches in the code manually. "Fine, thanks. You know, if I may say so … you don't  _ look _ all right."

"Really?" I look at my reflection and start playing with my hair, jostling my headphones a bit. I tug on my shirt collar. I shift my necklace a little to the right. "Is that better?"

Megumi rolls her eyes. "Yoh, you're so cute. I see why Anna is so possessive of you."

"Er …" I feel myself blushing slightly, but she picks up on something else …

"Oh, is that what's on your mind? Troubles with Anna?"

I sigh deeply, feeling my lungs deflate like punctured balloons. "Something like that, yeah."

She gives a nervous glance around. I'm the only customer in line, and her supervisor isn't nearby, so she slows her pace, taking her time with each item, weighing the produce as though it's solid gold. "Well … talk to me, Yoh. You're always so quiet in school. Or napping."

I give a little smirk at her gentle jab. "Anna …” The right words to express my feelings just aren’t coming. I look at Megumi blankly as I stammer, “Well, you see, she, um, you know …"

"Come on, Yoh, you can tell me. But hurry. I'm almost done ringing you up."

"I …" Out of the corner of my eye I see a lady trying to decide which checkout to wait for. It forces my hand, or at least my voice. "Okay, um, does Anna ever talk about … guys when she's around you?"

I thought I had asked the question smoothly, but Megumi breaks into a coy grin, and with her free hand she points at me as if I’m the main attraction at a traveling circus. "You're worried that your fiancée doesn't love you!"

"So what if I am?" Oops. The words just kind of escape me before I could think. Megumi gives a giggle, complete with head bobs.

"Well, I'd say half of Class B knows that Anna cares for you."

My eyes widen. "Why's that?"

"They've all faced the wrath of Anna's famous left. Yuko made a crack once in front of Anna. She said, if stupidity was cabbage, you'd be a family-size  _ okonomiyaki _ . And Anna put down her pen, stood up and" — Megumi slams her palm against the countertop, narrowly missing my carton of eggs — "and then Kentaro asked her, why are you hitched to some lazy loser like Yoh? And Kentaro's a big guy, you know him, but Anna just glared at him, reared back and smacked him full on the face. He flew five feet, I swear!"

"Wow … so …" I want to take a minute to savor what she’s just told me, but Megumi's already brimming with new insights. She's a very talkative girl, really.

"I'd watch your back if I were you. I mean, I hear the guys talking about it, like, every day." She hasn't scanned anything in a full minute, and she suddenly remembers her job. The carton of orange juice appears in her hand as she continues, "I agree with them. I'm jealous of Anna's looks, and a lot of guys go for the hard-to-get attitude, you know?"

See? Megumi thinks so too. I'm not stupid! Not this time, anyway. Shut up.

"But a lot of them feel that you're…well, you don't  _ appreciate _ Anna in the ways they can."

Before I can notice that my hands have balled up at my sides, and before I feel the rush of anger choking my brain, I blurt out, "That's ridiculous! Anna's difficult sometimes, but I love her!"

There is absolute silence. I can hear the pulse ringing in my ears, and I feel the distinct heat of blushing in my cheeks. Megumi looks a bit ruffled, but she recovers, nods, and begins to bag my groceries. "I know you do, Yoh. Besides, I sit right behind you in history class. I’ve seen what you’ve been putting together.”

“You have?” Damn -- I knew I should have been a little more discreet.

“Well, I caught a glimpse, and it certainly didn’t look like an essay about the Meiji Restoration.” She laughs, and I feel the corners of my mouth turn up as well. “Just watch yourself out there. Not everyone has the respect they should have for you. Whenever a girl's involved, nothing is off limits."

I simply nod as I slide a few bills across the counter. The change jingles in my pockets as I clasp my fingers around the plastic bag handles. "See you at school, Megumi."

"Stay safe, Yoh."

Megumi’s words have left me feeling paranoid. I step out of the supermarket hesitantly. Is someone out to get me and claim Anna as their own? As if I don’t already have enough on my plate with all the Shaman Fights.

My eyes shift between the long shadows in the supermarket parking lot. It's nice to know that Anna stands up for me at school in ways I didn't even know about until now, but Megumi makes a fair point. A skinny kid like me is pretty physically weak, after all, and without Harusame in my hand or Amidamaru behind me, I'm apt to get my skull bashed in by a jealous classmate off campus …

I don’t usually bring Harusame with me to the store, of course, on account of it being a deadly weapon, but right now, I miss it. And my spirit ally Amidamaru is probably off swapping war stories with Tokagero somewhere. It’s just me and my wits.

Interestingly, at this very second, as I long for my sword and for my samurai buddy, I'm hurtling through the air like a sack of potatoes, and a scrawny one at that. My flight seems to unfold in slow motion, the way it does in any decent action movie. I feel, from fingertips that seem disconnected from the rest of my body, the packages slipping from my grasp; I feel my airborne body somersault, and I careen forward with the world around me blurred and upside-down. Sometime around then I flail my arms wildly, as though trying to grasp the world by its handles and turn it right-side-up. Then, as the ground falls up to me, a final thought enters my mind, replacing  _ This is going to hurt like a bitch _ :

_ What the hell just happened?! _

Time reverts to its usual pace, and I roll over with milliseconds to spare. It’s far from my first time being hurled like a ragdoll, and I know how to cushion my falls. I tumble into a concrete wall, sprawled on my back, but spring back to my feet by kicking off the gravelly floor.

The head of an elongated shadow mixes with the thick, clear, yellow-polka-dotted puddle a few feet in front of me.  _ The eggs! Anna's going to kill me. _ Bits of sugar-coated confetti drift past me as the wind blows through my badly battered box of corn flakes. A crisp crunch, like the snapping of a fresh twig, echoes down the alley as a black boot stomps my bunch of celery.

I look up from the boot and swallow hard. And when I say look  _ up _ , I mean it. The waistline of his worn jeans is about level with the bottom of my ribcage. To see the collar of his extra-large T-shirt (which, I might add, doesn't look at all baggy), I already have to crane my neck upwards slightly. His face looks familiar, but then again, all meatheads tend to look the same to me. I infer that this behemoth is solely responsible for the acrobatic act I just performed. I consider pointing out his rudeness, but then I remember that I enjoy breathing. What I don't enjoy is not knowing why he felt the need to send me catapulting through the air.

I figure, as far as I can tell at least, that I'm not bleeding or crippled yet, so I try to play it cool. It's one of my strengths, anyway. "Nice distance, but you're gonna lose some points. I didn't stick the landing."

From about a foot above me, he sneers. And I mean he  _ sneers _ . When I try, it looks like I've got something stuck between my teeth. On the other hand, he looks truly menacing. Or even more so, I should say. "I don't know what's funnier. You, or the comically large putty knife they're going to need to scrape you off the sidewalk once we're through."

A surprisingly smart joke. Just my luck to run into the one thug this side of Tokyo with brains  _ and _ brawn. I'm outclassed both physically and mentally. It doesn't look like the play-it-cool approach is going to work this time, but I take one last stab at it. "Actually, it happened to my friend. The putty knife was exactly seventy-eight and three-quarter inches long. Now you know."

I thought it was pretty witty, but unless he expresses his joy by seizing people's shoulders in a death grip, I don’t think he found it very funny at all. "I'll cut the crap, Asakura. Anna's hot. And for some reason she’s with a loser like you. But I'm thinking, maybe your fiancée will realize how pathetic you are if, say, you don't make it home tonight. Or, for that matter, ever."

Let this be a lesson to you: It's always about a girl. Believe it.

I'm starting to realize, with his hand grinding my shoulder to bone meal, that it might not be the best time for bravado. It's also dawning on me that, although my Shaman training has left me in pretty decent physical shape, my little muscles are only going to result in needing a slightly larger putty knife to remove me from the pavement …

So I do what anybody would in my position. I play for time. Stalling always works in the movies, so why not? "Don't waste your time beating me up. It's not going to work. Anna's just going to visit me in the hospital. Nothing will change. I'll never hear the end of it, but she loves me. That's just the way it is."

Speaking those words makes me feel strange. I just made them up on the spot, hoping to buy my body another minute of wonderful, non-pulverized existence, but somehow they had felt right coming off my tongue, like they were more true than I had ever realized before …

"You think I haven’t considered that?" His voice snaps me out of my thoughts. It's a really distinctive one, well-enunciated, clearly educated, but also coarse and intimidating. I know I've heard it before. I’m sorely tempted to answer "No," but my desire to avoid becoming a Yohburger stops me.

"Ah yes, Anna is as good as mine. I'm sure you're not that upset. Certainly you understand why this was necessary …"

At those words I feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. By "this," I assume he's referring to a punch, or kick, or some combination of the two, but instead, he releases the death grip on my shoulder and reaches into his back pocket. I see this as a lowering of his guard. I sense adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I feel almost like some kind of hero from a popular anime! "Anna," I think, "remember when you slapped Kentaro for me? It's my turn."

My fist catches him just beneath his jaw. The satisfying crack of teeth gnashing together fills the air, and tiny droplets of spittle and blood spew from the corners of his taut mouth. His eyes close as his head recoils. For a brief moment I think maybe the shadowboxing Anna makes me do twice a week has paid off …

Nothing. Not even a soft grunt of discomfort, and the giant is reoriented. I hear his mocking laughter, and then I discover that the phrase "knock the wind out of" isn't just a saying.

There are no other words that can better describe this sensation. Blow up a paper bag and imagine it's one of your lungs. Then stomp on it as hard as you can. And multiply that by, oh, about 16.3. In that one instant when his steel-toed boot meets my ribs, I feel instantly winded, and I choke and sputter. Not to mention my back slamming the wall afterwards. I could've done without that part too.

I can’t make it sound heroic. I'm crumpled on the gritty alley floor. It seems that when I decided to pay back Anna's debt, I forgot one minor detail. Guys aren't supposed to hit girls. I, on the other hand, am protected by no such unwritten rule.

I push myself off the ground. Nothing really hurts yet, although I know it's only a matter of time before the rush wears off and my ribs start feeling like ground beef. I still have no idea how I'm going to take this giant of a classmate down, so I anchor my left leg and throttle my right at him. I may as well have kicked the wall instead. It probably would have hurt my foot less.

There is sudden warmth dripping down my upper lip and onto my chin, and I know even before my curious finger comes away coated with blood that I've been punched in the face. It's scary how numb the human body becomes to pain when it’s in mortal danger. My vision, though, has taken a turn for the worse. My foe splits in two, and both images are advancing on me now, two fists rearing back, and I dive in the nick of time. I look up, and the second image changes.

It is Anna.

She is facing me, observing my bloodied and battered figure. She sees me take a knee to the gut, emotionless, as my body hurls, doubled over, backwards. I take another cheap shot to the face, and her slightly pouty lips seem to insult me even as they remain shut. Pain begins to erupt through my flesh and dig into my bones, and I know I can only take so much more of this. A snap kick to the chest decks me, and as I collapse onto my back I see Anna's eyes narrow, glaring at me mercilessly …

I stumble to my feet, blind with one final jolt of adrenaline. I'm vaguely aware that I'm screaming something and running forward, but my field of vision is washed out. "FOR ANNA!" is my battle cry, and I feel my fists impacting flesh, digging in with strength that certainly isn’t mine. My legs join in without me even thinking about it, and soon I cannot think at all, my mind takes on a life of its own, and Anna draws closer, wearing a beautiful smile. She whispers, "See? We're so much stronger together," and corny music starts playing in the background, and she makes some comment about my heroism, followed by a passionate kiss that floods my lips with warmth and takes away all the bruises and lacerations and bleeding, then cut to credits …

Slowly the adrenaline rush fades, and I realize there are no end credits, there is no fanfare, and there certainly is no Anna. There's just a bunch of ruined groceries and a big guy facedown in a puddle of raw egg whites. The warmth on my lips isn't from the kiss I wish had been real. It's just blood, still dripping from my busted nose.

"Just another typical day. Now for the really painful part: getting chewed out by Anna."

On my way out of the alley, I spot the object that he had pulled out of his pocket just before I got the brilliant idea to try a suckerpunch. I turn it over in my hands and open it. It's his wallet.

"What was he saying? 'I'm sure you see why this was necessary' or something like that? It's just a wallet…" I mutter to myself, my voice stuffy from my bloody nose. I don't understand. There's nothing out of the ordinary in it except for an envelope that looks oddly familiar …

_ To be concluded in Kiss #14, "Eclipse" _

**Author's Note:**

> "A Shower of Kisses: Yoh x Anna One-Shot Collection" originally appeared on Fanfiction.net as "A Shower of Kisses". All stories copyright 2007 - 2021 by the author. Copyright renewed. Most rights reserved.
> 
> "Shaman King" is a trademark of Viz Communications in the U. S., and of other entities in other countries. The Shaman King intellectual property is copyright Hiroyuki Takei.


End file.
